The first three books in the DFC Library have been announced and are now available for pre-order on amazon uk! If you're a fan of the DFC, please read on for some important and exciting information, if you've never heard of the DFC, here's what it's all about:

The DFC was a weekly comic for children from David Fickling Books, featuring a number of ongoing strips that ranged from one-off funnies to episodic fantasy stories, with something in there for readers of every taste. Here's just a selection of the genuinely all-star cast involved: Adam Brockbank, Andrew Wildman, Ben Haggarty, Dave Morris, Dave Shelton, Emma Vieceli, Etherington Brothers, Gary Northfield, James Turner, Jamie Smart, Jason Cobley, Jim Medway, John Aggs, Julian Hanshaw, Kate Brown, Laura Howell, Misako Rocks!, Neill Cameron, Nick Sharratt, Patrice Aggs, Philip Pullman, Robert Deas, Sarah McIntyre, Simone Lia, Ted Dewan, Tony Lee, Zak Simmonds-Hurn.
For a full list of everyone involved, check out the Super Comics Adventure Squad Blog.

Despite being a well needed product and filling a big hole in the market, the timing was wrong and the economic recession meant that a project that should have been given a few years to take off was only given about 6 months before it was canned by Random House, who funded and published the comic.

Thankfully, it rises once more from the ashes in the form of the DFC Library which is being launched with lovely (and remarkably cheap!) hard-back collected editions of The Spider Moon, Mezolith and Good Dog, Bad Dog. This is great news for fans of these strips, but for anyone whose favourite strip isn't here, please bear in mind that these first titles are testing the waters. If all three don't do well, there won't be any more, so you can increase the chances of owning that strip you love by collecting the lot.

The last piece of good news is that the DFC itself might be back soon, with more funding straight from David Fickling Books rather than through Random House. This will mean that if it does return (and buying the DFC Library books will help with this too!) it'll be given a longer run and much better chance to succeed. I believe the British comic industry needs the DFC, it's one of only a handful of publications that have treated comics and comic artists well, and taken risks to push new and exciting material.

I'll be supporting it all the way.

This is just an early heads up that I'll be around the Avatar Press booth during this October's MCM Expo. This is Avatar's first English appearance, and the booths they put together are always stunning! It should be worth the visit.
Freakangels volume 3 will debut at the con, and more than enough copies of all the different editions of volumes 1 and 2 will be available for those who missed them last time, or have found them hard to get hold of!
A slim paperback artbook that I produced for Avatar will also be available, along with Freakangels prints, t-shirts and other merchandise. I'll be available for signing at the booth more often than not, and Kate, who is currently colouring Freakangels will be popping by too!

On the Tuesday after the convention we'll also be doing a signing at Orbital Comics in London, along with other artists. Info isn't up on the site yet, so I'll update with more details (including who the other artists will be!) when they're known.

I think I've abused this journal for the last time. I've always been a little unsure about using Deviantart to write journal entries that aren't just requests for help, or info about work, but I've always held off getting a blog... until now!

Apologies to those who are hearing this for the umpteenth time, but for those who haven't at all, I can now be found blogenating at [link]

There are four posts up at the moment, and I'm going to try to update in the future with stuff like tutorials, process breakdowns of my work, or just general tips and advice a la "How to Draw", so if anyone's got any requests, let me know. I'm looking for potential subjects to keep the blog fresh and interesting as time goes by

If anyone can reccommend a good backup software, that'd be great

I'm looking for something very straight forward, that can run a backup job that copies all files from chosen locations to other locations of my choice (preferably keeping the same folder structure, and definitely not putting backup files in anything but normal folders) and then runs every few minutes, updating files that have been changed or added since the last backup. Ideally, it'd be good to have a choice to save several different versions of each file, so previous versions can be restored, but to be able to set how many versions of each file are retained so that my backup drive doesn't just fill up with tons of different versions of large photoshop files (since I save very regularly).

I've tried Memeo, which had a perfect feature set but was horribly buggy, so I'm looking for something very similar to that but more reliable.

Any recommendations?

Okay, so I'm going to be doing some sculpting! More specifically I'm going to be making a sculpt that might be turned into a mold for a figurine (super top secret potential project, can't say more)...
The catch is that while I'm pretty familiar with sculpture and have the raw capability I'd need to make a good figurine, I've never made anything taller than a few inches! I've worked with green stuff (Games Workshop's epoxy putty) and milliput before, and I'm familiar with the general procedure of sculpting a figure (from armature to detail), however I've been looking into sculpting larger figures and I'm obviously somewhat in at the deep end here.

As far as I can tell, the most commonly used material for the master sculpts of larger (8-11 inch) figurines is polymer clay, and more often than not, super sculpey. I've heard that a 50-50 mix of SS and SS Firm makes a good base to work from. It also seems that building up your figure from the armature with aluminium foil is a frequently used trick to save money on clay and make the figure lighter.

However, I'm totally new to polymer clays, and am especially wary about the baking stage. I have a feeling there are plenty of tips and tricks to be used in the creation of a master sculpt that I'm ignorant of. So if any of my watchers who happen to read this have experience in this line of work, I'd love to hear from you and ask for advice! If not, referring me to someone who might be able to help, or to tutorials or books that cover the process in a *high* level of detail would also be great. I've found a few deviants out there who fit the bill and are gratuitously talented, but I wanted to try this approach before spamming stragers' inboxes with plaintive requests for their time.