Hurrah! All my Birmingham banners are now listed and commented. A big thanks to all the artists for taking the time to produce some really great images and for making my first proper convention such a great experience. Everyone was really friendly and chatty and I hope to catch up with many of them again at the Bristol convention next year. The complete list of artists is:

Brian Talbot
D'Israeli
David Hitchcock
Chris Phillips
Rufus Dayglo
Lorenzo Etherington
Mike Mignola
Duncan Fegredo
Emma Vieceli
Sean Phillips
Charlie Adlard
Phil Winslade
Leigh Gallagher
Lew Stringer
Staz Johnson
Mark Buckingham

I've now begun the long task of upgrading my website to Joomla 1.5, although I've hit a few snags that may delay the transfer. It seems that 1.5 is so new that the auto-thumbnail and popup plugins haven't yet been updated to cope with the new system. Therefore I need to play a waiting game and instead concentrate on getting all the information ported over and the templated designed before going live. Frankly, it means that a more complete version of the site will be launched later, which is probably a good thing! I know there are at least tens of people out there desperately anticipating this landmark development but I'm afraid you'll all just have to wait.

I offset this disappointment, I've established the artist banners now so that I can get them working here and iron out any problems with the database. A few of Joomla's limitations have got in the way of organising them effectively but it doesn't matter too much.

BBC's Coal House starts tonight and I'll be watching to see if they've used some of our FX in the titles (and BBC One ident.) Pobol y Cwm will be next week at 7.00pm on S4C. I'll have a writeup for both these projects ready for the new site when it launches.

Lastly, on Saturday I had the pleasure of meeting up with Leigh Gallagher who was visiting Cardiff to go to The Police concert. Leigh was drawing alongside Mike Collins at the Birmingham convention and also provided one of the banners at the top of this page. We had a refreshing cup of tea at Kemi's and then went on a quick tour of Cardiff Bay (mostly Doctor Who sites as there's nothing much else around here.) A very pleasant afternoon!

First entries: Mike Collins and Pia Guerra. Pia visited Mike's studio as part of her round-Britain Doctor Who tour. Sometimes it really helps being in Cardiff! Pia kindly christened my sketch book with a Yorick sketch and Mike followed closely after with a tableau of his most recent (and forthcoming!) work. 

I've just returned from the Birmingham Comics Convention, my second after the Bristol one earlier in the year. Had a really great time and met a lot of comic creators thanks to the ever generous Mike Collins (who had an office below the Dinamo one in Mount Stuart Square.) I was able to obtain a number of drawings by various artists and all will be posted on the new site which I'm building at the moment. Hopefully the basic version will be available before the weekend and I'll be taking the time to fill in some of the missing details from my work section. I'd wanted to use the Joomla migrator component to make my task a little easier but it doesn't seem to work and I think it's a good opportunity to review a lot of the old stuff before reposting it.

In other news, we've recently completed visual effects for the promo for BBC's new reality series Coal House and the new titles for long-running Welsh soap Pobol y Cwm. All were very hard work and stressful but the result is two projects we're really happy with and look great on screen. The Coal House one is even in cinemas so that's a bonus! Project-wise, things are moving forward very rapidly and after a few months of ground down nails, we've finally been able to plan for the future. Render farm, here I come!

I'll post more information about all these projects (and recent ones) on the new site when it's up. I'm planning to plan it like a scrap book as I can't think of any easier way to theme it. That way, its messiness can be a virtue. Also expanded will be a links directory and information about the comic creators I met over the weekend. It's about time I expanded the site to be a resource.