It's been many months since my last update, but I've been super busy in Shanghai since arriving back. Working on movies, computer games, promotions, live drawing. Some things I can share others I can't :( So here is what I can share.

My first clients when arriving in Shanghai were these guys.

guys http://www.reigndesign.com/ And for them I animated their new title screen, which you should see below. I didn't do the drawings though, just the animation ;) The other was a title character for their next game, flockwork. It's the brown dog. I'll also show you some concept sketches I initially threw together. Some just for in game poses and others for the initial character. Besides that I'm also right now negotiating other contracts I can't talk about and it's kinda why I've been absent from this site. I'm also busy away on a picture book, I'll post pics up for when I'm done, just a page or two, some sketches and how you can get it.

So the other pictures, the girls smoking (lili) was done on a spanking new android phone. It's a Motorola Atrix I bought cheap in Hong Kong. Has a nice 4 inch screen and I can play with it on long trips or long waiting for bank stuff. Android app store is still lacking in the art department software wise compared to apple, but hardware wise the Lenovo thinkpad will probably be my next tablet as Android apps mature. So I'll use my phone to keep tabs on whats cool, and when to convert.

The iPad is still cool though. The B&W thing is Billy the Daemon Slayer done on my iPad2, which is a creation by Hayden Fryer. He's releasing a trade paperback collecting a bunch of his comics and me with other artists are contributing some pinups for him :) you can check out Billy at http://www.siberianproductions.com/ or look for Billy Daemon slayer on facebook.

That's it for now. Hop to post more frequently, but over occupied with other things :( hope to post cool stuff though.

This is just a test if I can update my blog with this through the great firewall of Chin. I can't look at it. Here's what I painted on the plane.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I'm in the Moscow airport. Probably won't have a chance to update this blog for a while, so here's something I did halfway. I did it in art rage. It's a good app but its failing with the iPad specs and it's chugging and complaining about memory. bah!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Very strange, but my last post ended up in June, not sure why. Anyway trying to get used to posting with blogpress, which kinda blows that I have to pay for something I used to do for free on the Internet. That's a minus point for iPad. It's a hassle transferring all my work to my Mac and two pounds isn't what's going to send me broke.

Anyway let's hope this post gets into the right date. If it does my last post went backwards to June or something. Today is the 13th of August.

As for this piece? Nothing special really. Just using this app really, and putting up anything and hope this site won't be blocked when I get to China. Apparently if you enter in through blogger it should be OK or I hope I can update through this app without being blocked. I did this as a sketch club comp thing. That's about it. Doesn't look to be that popular :p




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

the color version they ended up using for a flyer to promote new CzuCzu stuff.

Some vector art with the School Girls and a comic strip for CzuCzu. I've written and sketched out around 20 of those. Waiting for some approvals. Also I might have to mentions, I might not be going to Japan afterall, as I'm negotiating something with a gaming company in Beijing. I'm hoping it all works out and they can pay me OK. I still have a thing with the CzuCzu guys which will get me some pocket money and keep me drawing if I choose to teach in Japan, but Beijing is a pretty sweet city. It's more arsty than Shanghai (Which so far is my favorite city I have lived in), so we'll see. Oh well if I'm not updating this for longer than 2 months, I'm probably in China and haven't got a hold of a VPN yet ;)

Oh, shit! It's been a while since I posted. Been super busy traveling around saying good bye to family and friends. Also concentrating on wrapping stuff up for work. Meaning I had to finish a 60 + page style guide for CzuCzu. Kinda glad I got to finish it as it's a fantastic document to show what needs to be created for an IP. Something a lot of small companies think is not so important. As for these pics? Nothing much really, just some relaxing pics to take my mind off what I should be concentrating on, and I submited most of them to some sketchclub competitions. The sun did well and made it into the top 20, but the Panda kinda bombed, and I'm not sure why. I liked it. Also the Vampire one is fairing worse than I expected, so a bit bumbed by that, as it's another one I kinda liked.

A bit busy working on my follow up book, but here's something interesting that came into my inbox. My CzuCzu keychains :) First 'mass produced' merch I designed. There'll be a 100 000 of these. I think the sex toy boxes were a larger amount, but this will most likely be in my CV highlights. Totally stocked about this :)

Also I am moving to Japan at the end of next month to start my next chapter in life. I love my job here in Krakow, but the town is too small for someone like me (My initial complaint about Sydney which is 5 times bigger than this). although I'll most likely start teaching English when I get there, I hope the environment will be great for me to be inspired to do the crazy stuff I used to be known for in my small press indie comic days :)

My best friend Sooz who's been a close friend and visited me in Every country I called home since I left Australia. That includes Korea, China and now Poland, and for a brief period London, but that's her turf. She loves personalised shoes which she first asked me to make waaay back in Australia. Her love of Naomi and Poggie stuff is what keeps these guys alive. ... well it helps a lot. Anyway here's my latest shoe I made for her. It's her Polish shoe. I think it's my best one yet. The Polish things are kind of token gestures. A couple of interesting facts. The markers I used, cost more than the actual shoe. I took a risk with the shoe as it was super hard to find plain white shoes for some reason. Really. I went to a ton of skate shops I knew in the neighbourhood and none had plain white shoes. Not fo girls and that size. I sometimes I must stress rarely saw something my size.

The video was done with my iPad using a new super 8 filter. Kinda like the hipstamatic, but for video. I have no proper video camera, and the iPad has a reaaaally shit camera. This app fixes it a bit though. Makes it more fun anyway.

I created a bunch of layers in procreate, an app for iPad. I did this to celebrate the HD update to the app. It's probably the best app at the moment in some ways. Definately faster than sketchbook pro. Also 16 layers!!! compared to sketchbook pro's 4. Autodesk has been handed an iPad challenge! I comped the layers in After effects on my Mac. It's also new Naomi! :)

Well here you have new designs for Naomi and Poggie. There will be a propper forum where I'll launch them. This is just a sketch blog. The ribbon on Naomi's head will be bigger. I want to do at least one nice project with these characters, i should drop them after they have failed to be popular for 12 years and counting, but I'm stupid. The random cat pictures I have there that are not Poggie, but just work pitches I get to do. kinda fun.

Anyways explaining the design changes. My last couple of jobs I had to design IP and make sure these things are merchandisable. Especially for making toys. Poggie had thin limbs, and those hair piece are horrible for everything, animation and toy making. So I took him and made him more similar to a cat from my kids book "Bazgroly dla gagatka". It's Polish ;) Naomi, just wasn't simetrical. If you look at some of her 2009 toy designs i did that fringe is horrible for 360 drawing. It only really worked in 3/4 view. It was a massive improvement from her baseball cap days.

Also the sloppy thing. I want to design a cool sticker bomb using sloppy. It's not cool yet.

These are my sketchclub sketches. It's a cute little community awesomely integrated into this sketch app. You might see Naomi and Poggie looking different as Poggie takes a photo of Naomi shitting in a mug. Will get onto that in a later post been working on this for a while now. But Been busy with work that's paying money, so letting this project leak very slowly. I hope to steer it towards my paying job soon, as I do get to pitch stuff. Also the little Lily blowing a huge fart is based on something I drew while working in Disney. At Disney I was an FX artist. I actually got into that department. Benefits were that we weren't stuck to drawing one thing per project like the character guys were, we were still drawing all day, and we weren't stuck drawing disney stuff, yet our work appeared in Disney films. Anyway lot's of overtime and the weird person I am. I draw in my spare time too. I have issues I know. Anyway during a break while working on Lilo and Stitch 2 I drew this drawing of Lilo (i loved that design, Chris Sanders has a really nice drawings) making a mega fart while having her usual smile on. I really got lost in the fart design, and I revisited that and got lost in it again. One day I will actually animate it :)

Soon I'm going to stop mentioning I draw everything on iPad. I do. I have 4 or 5 art apps I work around. Anyway here is an exception. I'm a beta tester for Autodesk Sketchbook. I'm more interested in the tablet versions of their product, but I'm testing out some new features on updates to the new desktop version. Since the last version of Sketchbook pro I used was still made by Alias, I'm not sure what is it they improved exactly, but I figured I should get to know the desktop app anyway. These are caricaturama 3000 comp entries. Mainly practices. I don't think I'll take caricaturing seriously. It's fun to do, but the pressure of getting the likeness all the time is hard, and the problem s it makes you focus too much on face and the excersize makes you forget about everything else.

So, Michael Moore was done in Sketchclub for iPad. I did this so I had something to upload to that community. The Jason Siegel (Guy from how I met your mother) one, was done in Sketchbook Pro Mac OS X ;) Both bits were just tests. I'm a shit painter, so i used this as an excersize to paint with MM and JS was a completely different test. Sketchbook Pro is an awesome app (Though why does the iPad version not have a lasso?). Anyway I sold my intuos (As it was already dodgy anyway, it's why I bought an iPad), so I had to use a bamboo we have from work. It's cheap, and no pro would pretend it's a serious art making tool. I think it does the job fine though. And personally back in the analog days a stationary shop had more of the tools I needed than a dedicated art shop.

Saying all that. I'm on my second iPad and I've been using it for almost a year now, and drawing with a pen is a pain now since I got used to my finger and pinch zooming, which is so much better than hunching over paper like I used to. So going back the that and being so disconnected to the screen sucks balls. So as you can see I had a lot more patience with an inferior app on my iPad than something on my desktop. The iPad frustrates me a lot with day to day normal non artsy use. jotting notes, organising things for meetings, web browsing, e-mail. It's fiddly. Magic paper to draw on? Awesome! So it's not replacing my computer anytime soon. Also iTunes sucks on iPad. Although I found a radio app that is cool.

I'll be posting up some new sketches :)

A comic strip I did at work :) I did everything in High res on my iPad2 using sketchbook, and CzuCzu was colored in photoshop. Using color picker to get the characters from other files is not so convenient yet.

I just downloaded an iPad app to be able to directly upload pictures from it to my blog. Might be more frequently updating then :) Especially if it allows me to do it from China, which maybe it won't :(

As for the pic. Some guys took some guy out for ilicit substances. My recollection is that I wasn't involved. Anyway it was a total let down and that 'guy' went home at 3am feeling sober. I put into a comic so maybe I can remember this for something else :)

More owls as we're solidifying to a design. I like where it's going :) All done in Procreate. A very nice app, just needs a higher resolution Cancas. It's promised to come in the next update, but when is it? Also an interesting note, this app was done by a couple of dudes in Tasmania :) It's kinda cool that some people from down there have made something cool :) I'm not an avid patriot to support blindly anything from Australia or Hungary, but when something genuinely good comes from there. I feel a little better :) The color owls done in sketchbook pro ;)

I have several new Naomi and Poggie stuff to upload, but there's no good blogger app to allow me to post pics directly from my iPad. So there's be some stuff soon. Till then here are the owls :)

The latest supanova ad in Sydney. 500+ views, 5 likers, one hater. Vocal hater. Will spend more time on the next years one. I was kinda happy with it considering the time I had for it, but at the end of the day it's the final product that matters, and the client. I'm stoked feedback from Danny is usually good.

I'm planning a little more for next years one :)

I always thought owls were boring crappy animals not deserving of being anything but a humourless side note in cartoons. Doing research on a project at work I realised Owls are funny as shit. Just look at that photo! Don't you want one?

I'm just doing concept work for this book project for this dude to take over. It's him and his wife's baby, the company I work for is publishing it and I help out most projects we start up. Meeting him tomorrow.

On the technicalities. Yellow Owl over there was done in sketch club, the washed out one was done in Adobe Ideas. The other two were don in sketchbook pro. Now that there's a higher res version of it I'm using it again.

On another note my books been out for 2 days, feedback is good, but waiting for sales. Hope it's good!

A bunch of my new inkpad drawings. getting more confident in them. The teacher teacher one took me about 2 hours. Still a little long I think. Most sketches initially done in brushes, except the teacher teacher one. A new sketchbook pro update came with a higher res canvas :) it's not as slow as they warned it would be. The colour image is a wedding present for an ex coworker in China. He's a good artist himself. I initially wanted to do something in the new updated high res version of Artstudio, but it was a bit slow and not coming out the way I wanted it to. The birds are sketches from that version, but I redrew the couple in brushes. I'll be honest, the guy strikes some resemblence, but is not as fun looking as I would want it to be, and the girl kinda the same issue. Maybe more fun and less resemblence... Anyway, I hope they like it :)

My latest Toy sample, based on concept art. :) Not much to add yet, waiting for a sample to arrive from another factory. It looks a littlebit more on model than this from photos I received, but a tad lesser in quality... they do produce at a lower price, so looking at cost and quality overall. This process is soooo slow, and considering I'm new to this, learning and I don't want to do a shit job for once, it's not speeding things up :(

Well, here they are! Our books! So a little about it. The publisher I work for/with whatever way we want to word it :) feels more like with than for. So here's my first project with them. My contribution here is basically making sure we keep some signature things intact with logo and the bubbles. Wanted to integrate somehow moreso the future merchandise we have coming out with it, but we're little out of time as we do have to release things to make money. I also did one book that I'll preview here. Besides me the other 3 artists in this series of books Asia who's work you can see here http://www.joannagolab.com/, Jystina who's site http://szczepankiewicz.com/ and Filip who i make innapropriate jokes with he's site is http://www.jabbonarium.blogspot.com/

So have a look at their work, I don't think they have much else from their own book, but a ton of cool personal stuff :)

As for my book. I couldn't be bothered going through my files, so I just took photos of some of my more favourite pics. The books are for kids to finish off, two other ladies wrote texts for the book in Polish :) explaining or hinting for kids what to do. There will be an English version, and I think also a German, French and maybe Chinese version too. Besides seeming like I aimlessly drew 245 drawings, to come up with 35 drawings a week a drew from some expriences, so some samples here include my time spray painting in Shanghai, Cricket reminds me of Australia where I lived technically most my life, Also my best friend from Uni plays the drums, and another close friend is a harp player, so that's where those drawings come from. The DJ one has no meaning, but that's my fave pic. The Panda is a reoccuring creature, with a Tobacco Bunny esque rebbit, a cat and a monkey. I thought robots would be more prelevant, but hardly any, besides the monkey one here, maybe 3 more in the book. Ice cream!! Reoccures many times in the book, and on this site :) Best ice cream in Argentina I tells ya! I will make an icecream pilgrimage there one day. I was there when I was 11, so it's been a while.

The technicalities! I drew all the drawings initially on my iPad using sketchbook pro. Because the resolution limitations I had to live trace them on illustrator. Then Filip did all the lay out and preparations for print.

So I think that's all I'll write about. It'll be out first through empyk.com in Poland May 18th, than 2 weeks later in plenty of other stores around Poland. Have no clue when the international versions are coming out :( I know there are English versions coming out, and I can't confirm, but I think German versions will be out even earlier.