Illustration: Patate Douce pour t-shirt

 

A t-shirt design for my 2-year-old nephew. I made similar shirts for his older cousins last year so now he will have one. The ankylosaurus was fun enough to draw and I am keeping to the more details and shaded style of the fries image I just did. I will need to update the characters for the older kids next. There are lots of versions of this type of dinosaur and just mixed and matched characteristics to my linking. It's fr fun, not science! (Patate douce is a sweet potato, BTW.)

Illustration: Patates frites

 
Since my first grand-nephew, I have been calling him and those that followed as "Les Patates" (the potatoes). The first was the big potato, the second little potato, and the third "patate douce" (sweet potato).  With a fourth coming in January, I am seriously running out of types of potato! I thought it would be fun to make little cartoons to put on t-shirts for them as they got older. Christmas last year they got shirts with them riding dinosaurs in thier potato form. 

Four the 4th in this expanding series, I went with "Patates frites" or french Fries. The earlier ones were very simple and more like a child drew them but since they are getting older I wanted to make versions more finished looking. I don't how I will use the drawings so I used Affinity Designer to make this one and with vector art I can resize it as I need to and it has a clean look the kids will like. So, yes, I will be remaking the other three so they look consistent and also to represent where the older ones are now. 

Illustration: Piccola pour keamy

 I drew this for my friend Keamy, it's his new cat. She is a little darling. I had done a portrait of his previous cat, Olive. Procreate ink with a little colour added for interest. 

Games: No man's Sky Voyager update.

 

No Man's Sky had another huge update recently. As usual with me, there are a bunch of major improvements I won't really use but they are great additions to the game. Now you can make a ship you can walk around inside and basically have a flying home base. You can also invite other players along with you, not something I am likely to do but what a great thing for those who love online play with friends.

I noticed my graphics were better, it has been a little buggy. My character gets caught inside objects at times and game will open with the screen split into mirrored sides and I have to put the computer to sleep and wake it up to fix that. Overall it's pretty sweet.

Making your own "corvette class" ship is easy enough for the basics but you can get vert creative and some people have already made some incredible ships. I made one and then recently remade it with some tricks I learned. My original ship was massive. So much so I couldn't land it in many places. This new one is easier to land but all the corvette ships are much larger than the standard starships and they can't dock on landing pads or in your freighter, which is a little limiting. You can decorate the inside and set it up as a home base though you won't be able to fit some of the larger machines inside you might use on a planet bound base. 

There is a mutli stages mission with the new updates and they are better with multi-players I would guess. You can leave the spaceship while it's in space and fall to the planet surface or spacewalk. I have not tried either yet but, maybe. 

Illustration: Panda Roux for my grand-nephew

 My nephew's sons wanted me to make drawings for them for Christmas this year. They requested dinosaurs (and they will get them for their birthdays next year) but I decided to surprise them with something unexpected. After a trip to the zoo, the oldest was obsessed with Red Pandas and the youngest is obsessed with bugs so I'll give them prints of those things instead. 

I haven't done a procreate drawing all year! I had been doing at least one drawing a month but I just don't have the time and constant interuptions have made it impossible. Hopefully I can get back on track. I am not really happy with how I do hair and fur in colour artwork so far. This is better than my normal but I think I am missing something I can't put a finger on. 

Masque of the Red Death (2025) Directed by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

This project was suggested to me at a showing of one of my earlier animations. I did not think I could pull it off, the story has over 1000 people and a setting involving 7 rooms of various colours among other technically challenging aspects. After reading the story a few times more I decided it could be pulled back with less people and less room and still keep the tone and message of the story intact. 

Even so, it would mean animating more characters in several shots than I ever had before and involve some animal simulations I wasn’t sure how to pull off. Poe’s wordiness and descriptions were also pulled back partly to reflect the simpler setting but mostly to reflect how bad a narrator I am. I did enhance my voice a little to make it sound better. 

I used Make Human and Human Gen to create the characters. This made it feasible to make so many and also Human Gen can add clothes you make or buy in an easy way which I really needed for this project. One thing that Blender has in abundance is reasonably priced fantastic addons so my one man show looks better, I hope, than it would have totally on my own. 

It was rendered in EEVEE and compositing and colour work was done in Apple Motion while editing was done in Final Cut Pro. 

I did have issues with Human Gen here and there. A few characters suddenly had finger rigging  issues and I wish that plugin had more secondary facial controls like Make Human. It has much better skin and hair so it’s a question of which I could get the most out of. The robed figure was simply rigged withAuto Rig pro. Something I plan to use more in future. 

Not what is next except to get familiar with compositing in Blender. I would like to use depth maps and maybe motion  maps in Apple Motion like I used to and separate elements for better colour corrections. I will try and redo some older animations I think will be greatly improved over the Cinema 4D versions and decide on a new project as I go go through all of that. 

Mobius Meadows Farmstead photos

I spent a few days in the scalding heat at my friend's farm in Vermont. One day we had an hour of rain which was a relief and produced some really cool clouds. I also got to finally try and photograph the hummingbirds and got some OK images.  

Masque of the Red Death - opening credits

Been animating a lot lately. The credits are sort of inspired by Roger Corman horror films in the 60s. As usual I am learning more about Blender with this project and just animated 6 characters in the same shot which is a record for me. My version of C4D had issues after 3 characters and this went mostly smoothly. Composing music is not my thing but I am happy with how this worked out. 

The Picnic - 5 decades of the Million Year Picnic (2021,2023) directed by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

 

This was a decade+ long project. Getting interviews and information was much harder than I thought. It was edited and re-edited quietly a few times: sometimes making it longer, sometimes shorter. Getting it shown anywhere was also difficult. I foolishly thought the place was such comic store legend I could get conventions and small festivals to show it. A couple a small festivals did end up showing but the place I really wanted it to play was the Brattle Theatre which is almost across the street from the store. That happened in July 2024 and those who went were good to tell me they liked it. Never got paid, sadly but at least it got it's day in that historic cinema. 

I would really love more people to see the film, the Picnic is and has been a fantastic, special place run by special people and is one of the last independent stores in Harvard Square. The original owner, Jerry Weist, was a ground breaker when he started the store and continued to lead the way when he left the store and started selling the original comic book art at Sotheby's elevating it as the original form of American art it was and is. I was the manager there in the mid-80s and still count my colleagues from those days as friends. 

Just another part of Boston(ish) history I don't want to be forgotten and I hope this makes people want to visit Harvard Square and see how wonderful this odd duck of place is and get captured by it's friendliness and charm. 

Summer reading / research - on vampires

 I often look to folklore and legends for inspiration. I listen to several podcasts about the stuff and recently read or reread some books on the history of vampires. I don't have plans to make a film or write a story involving vampires but they are fascinating and their history is mixed up with other folklore and legend. 

The First Ghosts: A rich history of ancient ghosts and ghost stories from the British Museum curator by Irving Finkel

Very interesting book talking about the translated cuneiform tablets in the British Museum that detail the earliest ghost stories. Could have a been a dry read but the author has an entertaining style and obviously loves his work. 

Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires: The Rules to Determine True and False Cases by Antoine Augustin Calmet

A 1700s discussion of all manner of supernatural phenomenon. How could I resist that title? Well, I wish I had to be honest. The chapters are usually short and have notes at the end of each but the author wraps everything in a Christian/Catholic blanket that smothers any hope of learning much about the legends of the past except the God must have approved of them or they were hallucinations or whatever. It gets very close to the real reasons people might have believed in such things but then vers off in to it's on religious mythology. It does mention some stories mentioned in the first book on this list which means those tales were still circulating 1000s of years later.

The Vampire: A New History by Nick Groom

A new book less focused on individual folklore but on the history of the concept of the vampire and how in before relatively recent times it was common to think of ghosts, werwolves and vampires as the same thing. Very well researched and makes it points with some humour and interesting asides. 

And  finally.... Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber

A book I reread or use as reference all the time, it's my favourite source for bloodsucking lore.