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 :)