Dublin Comic Con is fast approaching and we recently caught up with two Brown Baggers who will not only be attending but will be exhibiting and selling their work at the event! We chatted to Art Director Andrew Hamilton about his recent character sculpts and what he's currently working on outside of studio hours and we also discussed selling your art with Storyboard Revisionist Izzy Von Metzradt, who is a convention veteran having started selling at her own stall at the age of 13!

Andrew: Recently I have been focusing on a new project outside of Brown Bag. Myself and a friend, John Berry, have been collaborating on creating character sculpts and busts of our own design with the intent to sell resin copies of them at Dublin Comic Con this year, so I thought that now would be a good time to share it! We mostly work in various oil based clays like Chavant NSP and MonsterClay, these will be moulded in Silicone and then cast out in hard resin.

John and myself have been friends for about 10 years now (wow, I feel old) when we met in college in IADT Dun Laoghaire, and have always been interested in creatures, aliens and monsters. While I pursued a career in digital animation, John has been working steadily in the live action film industry, working in the prosthetics FX departments of such TV shows as ‘Vikings’ and ‘Penny Dreadful’. Johns' sculptures and designs are heavily inspired by mythology and old texts such as ‘Dante’s Inferno', but he also enjoys more science-fiction related alien characters.

I’ve posted a lot of my work on Brown Bag Labs before, usually a mish mash of aliens, monsters and creatures sculpted in clay, but recently I’ve been exploring the world of 3D prints. Pictured below is my first full bust from the printer, all sculpted in ZBrush. I have also started including 3D printed elements into the clay sculptures, so that there is a nice blend of mechanical and organic.

We have a table booked in the craft section of Dublin Comic Con, this will be our first ever convention and we are really excited about displaying and selling our artwork. We will be sharing updates here on Brown Bag Labs but also on our Facebook and Instagram, so stay tuned!

Izzy: I’ve been working as a Storyboard Revisionist in Brown Bag for around 5 months now but previously I was working as an independant artist doing commission work online and travelling around Dublin to conventions to sell in the Artist Alleys since 2011.

I still do a little bit of online commission work on the weekends, and my convention line up shows no signs of stopping! I’ve been selling at them every year since I was 13, my first one being an anime convention called Eirtakon.

I sold at Dublin Comic Con last year, so this will be my second year running!

Last year was incredibly successful and an absolute ton of fun, you meet so many great people and get to mingle with other great artists at the same time.

I have been selling poster prints of my work, and lately branched out into stickers, charms, postcards and even on-the-spot commissions. (I may even have an art book in the works but shhh!)

I’ve been very lucky to have many successful years selling my art, and all the enthusiastic people I meet at conventions always inspire me to continue.

I’d say my area of expertise would be fantasy and sci-fi stuff. I’ve always been fixated by dragons since I was little, so anything quirky and somewhat ferocious will always grab my attention. Pin ups are incredibly fun as well, and I love designing characters to put in them. (If I can combine them with a dragon, then even better right?) I’m also heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell, Full Metal Alchemist and other sci-fi/fantasy themed animes.

Video games play a huge part in my work as well, you’ll find influences from Legend of Zelda, Splatoon, and some other things inspired by Nintendo. I guess you could call my work a mish mash of all things cute, scary, weird and everything in between.

I’ve lately been doing time-lapse videos where you can watch some of my artwork being created from scratch. I only have a few up on YouTube right now, but feel free to browse the ones I have!

I have lots of cool new things planned for this years DCC, and I am beyond excited for it this year! There will be lots of updates as the date draws nearer, so if you want to you can follow me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram! You can also find more of my work on my website: www.helixel-illustrations.com

Stay posted for more updates coming up soon for this year's Dublin Comic Con which takes place August 6th and 7th in the Convention Centre.