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. 

 

I made this poster before I saw the film. I was inspired by the look of the character I saw in clips and since I have not done any art for months I wanted something light. Light was still challenging. This is done in vectors with Affinity Designer and I think is my best resemblance to the real person so far using that technique. I used several shots from the movie as reference and I modified the lighting for the effect I wanted. 

It's a silly thing but I am happy with how it came out. 

50 Years (2025 restored version) Directed by Vincent-louis Apruzzese

 Originally released in 2002 under the title "46 Years", "50 Years" is a recollection of memories and events as they relate to Ralph Hodgdon and Paul McMahon and their life-long love for each other. 

I revisited them 5 years after this was screened in Provincetown, Massachusetts and put for sale on Amazon as times had changed and the couple were able to get married on their 49th anniversary. It seemed right to do an additional interview after their 50th anniversary of the day they met and one year after they were able to get legally married. 

The restoration started in January 2025 when I discovered I had many, but not all the originals scans of the photos used in the film. My software also avowed me to take out the background music and improve the sound and more easily rework some edits. I still had the music done by David M. Puryear and was able to add it back in after the changes were made. 

Shot on Standard Definition video, before HD was a thing does limit how much improvement I could do on my own. I did clean up the titles between sections and updated the credits. I also had to take a break when Ralph got very ill and died in April 2025. Paul had passed in April 2011 and it was just too difficult work on. 

The 2020 version of the movie is for sale/rent on Amazon Streaming Prime Video.