02 October 2025
Icons series: Lost in Space
I drew the three elements for this a LONG time ago and then forgot I was going to add them to my icons series of designs. I just had to make the logo and place them. Laxy I guess. Not my favourite TV show by a longshot but it does have its place in history and the robot and Jupiter Two spaceship are great designs.
25 September 2025
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.)
23 September 2025
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.
17 September 2025
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.
10 September 2025
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.
30 August 2025
Illustration: Panda Roux for my grand-nephew
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.
22 August 2025
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.
20 August 2025
Mobius Meadows Farmstead photos
23 July 2025
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.
09 July 2025
The Picnic - 5 decades of the Million Year Picnic (2021,2023) directed by Vincent-louis Apruzzese