2026 A lot going on

 
So it seems I am destine to post to this blog just once a year.  My update last year focused on how hostile social media had become and how I had begun to percieve an instability in the world that was beginnig to affect my business.  

One year later. 

For sure the adoption of AI has mean I have had to rethink my business plans.  I no longer push my illustration service any more. For the past year the only illustration service I promoted was my technical illustration service - for the the science and engineering sectors.   My thought there was that these images have to be accurate and precise and would not be an easy service to obtain using AI.  That remains somewhat true for now.  I can see that I have strarted to compete with AI in that area.  Work has dropped off but not disappeared as it has for illustration.  Seeing the Marvel team been let go was a blow.  If they were dispensible my illustration work would never find a buyer.   I should say I have decided not to use any AI in my image creation at all.  I have also decided to reject any work that requires me to work off AI generated images.  I tried it and it was a miserable experience so I wont do it in the future.  I will have to rely on my one brain.  

Some technical graphic design 

https://sciencedesignservices.com/technical-illustration-service/

As for the 3D animation part of the business that too is under threat.  Most of the work I have done has been in marketing but on technical  subjects. 

3D illustrations

AI has still not been able to deliver consistant renders for longer form content so I still believe I can compete there for now but its still challenging.  

As I said last year I would create more physical objects.  As part of that effort I bought a 3D FDM printer.  Spent the past year learning how to model and print by offering a custom 3D print service which is slowly growing. My Etsy shop   My principal plan for this is to print 3D scenes and graphics.  Take the technical grapics and produce them in 3D - targetting businesses. Still have to execute on this. 

Designed and printed 3D models

3d printed parts to create a fireplace for Christmas decoration

3d printed  fireplace for Christmas decoration

Pen Holder, Desk Organizer, 

Etsy link 

The churn on software has presented its own challenges.  I abandoned Adobe Cloud and moved to Affinity which worked out well until .... Affinity bought by Canva stopped their payed model and went "free".  Should be delighted right but I would have preferred to keep paying and own the software.  Now they can add/ remove features at will.  That unpredicatbility is not welcome when you are running a business and need a reliable workflow. For now I still work in the version I own but I have plans to learn Krita.  Blender too has got caught up in the AI battle with coporate donors having a stake in development.  Will watch that one closely.  

So all in all very hard last year.  A lot of financial investment - needed a new PC which I built for the first time myself.  The investment in the 3D printing equipment which I have still to fully employ.  The time I had to invest in that combined with a drop in commissions as I try to move into new sectors meant I had one of my worst years financially as a freelancer .  

A short I made for personal work

Animation here

As you can see alot of the work I did last year was in the nuts and bolts stuff but I did manage to make a few pieces of art 

One of the few upsides to the disintegration of the digital art market is that it has made returning to traditional media more attractive.  

I have used pen and ink and oils for personal work.  To shake the cobwebs off those skills I completed a series of masters studies in oils.  I did a few copies of work by Rosa Bonheur.  These are all for sale on my Etsy shop           

  I am planning some more landscape paintings.

A standing horse, painted after Rosa Bonheur 

White Horse after Rosa Bonheur

A Stag after Rosa Bonheur

So thats the state of play for now.  The US war on Iran is dragging on and cost of living continues to climb.  For now I plan to keep on and keep making art. 

Whats UP?

 

Its been a while.  Alot has happened personally and in the world generally since I last posted here last year.  Unfortunetly what is happening in the world is having an impact on my business.

One impact is one that I have been mulling for a while.  The social media scene is something I dont think I would have got invoved with if I was not running a freelance business. I am just not that social but I felt I had to to self promote.  As the atmosphere has become more and more hostile I have struggled to post.  

I finally conceded that the encouragement of hatred and negativity on some platforms meant I did not want to post there - never mind the AI bs that they are pushing.  So I deleted my accounts on twitter,  facebook and instagram.  I did start an account on Bluesky and for now it is actually a pleasant experience.  

The world is now a more dangerous place and I have begun to factor that into my decisions on how I proceed.  

I started out as a traditional artist and feel I want to move more in that direction.  I have relied on online sales and promotion but I hope that creating physical pieces will allow me to work and sell locally and connect more with people.  

In the meantime I am still creating 3D animations and illustrations.

I plan to post on how I made this faux stained glass window and I have a few other projects in the planning stage.  Hope you will continue to check in here as I do plan to post somewhat more. 

Big Bear Game Art

 

I started creating a series of promotional art for a ficticious game.  This was to practice going through the design process.  I have found alot of my work falling somewhere in the territory between illustration and graphic design so creating these kinds of assets seemed like a natural fit.  

The game style chosen was a low poly game where you play a bear that destroys things.  The name is fictional but there is a real game based on this concept.  

All the assets and animation were created for the promotion.  So that means that no in game assets or animations were available.  I would guess that for a commission some assets would be avilable such as logo, props characters ect. but here everything was created.   The principle focus was creating everything required for the animation.
The logo created was big chunky brutalist affair with a few cracks but not so many to make the read difficult.

  The animation was however structured to be in rendered in layers. 

This allowed the assets and effects to be separated in numerous combinations and sizes.  This is important as the game would be promoted accross multiple platforms in different comformations.  Probably the most of important of these is the Steam capsule art requirements. 

All assets and animations were created in Blender.  

The explosion was a free Janga FX asset. The animation was comped in DaVinci Resolve while the images were built in Photoshop CS6. 

The sound effects were from an animal sounds bundle from the Epic Store and the music was a loop from a great  free music / sound resource https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/free-music-samples-royalty-free-loops-hits-and-multis-to-download-sampleradar .

All in all a fun build.

Still Here

 

A year since my last post here but that does not mean I have forgotten.  I stop by from time to time and this still remains the most comprehensive documentation of what I have been up to.  I thought other social media would take over but the shine has definetly gone from those sites. The traffic is down and the agression is up so I have been on there less and less.  I have set up my own website and that is what I have spent the most energy on maintaining.  If you are in your art journey and dont have your own website I would urge you to set one up.  As you can see social media trends wax and wane and change ownership and terms.  Your site will remain within your control and be a fixed point for all your work.  

A trend with a massive impact in the last year has been AI.  If this was 10 years ago I would for sure be rethinking my career plans and thinking about what to specialise in.  There is no doubht jobs are been lost in concept art, stock art, marketing art and I see jobs requiring artists include ai in their workflow.  I have all but stopped creating illustrations for commissions.  I imagine only the top tier big names will survive in those fields.  I still enjoy drawing and painting but create for myself. These are some 2 hour studies from photos  created as part of studybuddies. 

 

For now the more specialist, bespoke art still requires an artist.  I have focused on continuing with 3D with some animation. 

I even recorded some starter Blender tutorials.  Something I plan to add to but maybe in shorter form. 

The other strand of work is graphic design for technical folk. 

It is still a struggle to get by.  The cost of living increases are hard to battle against. Despite all that I am still here and still producing work.  I recomend checking in on my website to see all my work https://dertypaws.com/

I have lots more to post so I will come back and continue to add to this. In the meantime if you have any questions drop them in the comments and I will answer if I can.  

3D model of an ebike

 

Its been a while.  

I have been working and practicing.  The latest personal project was modelling this ebike.  I wanted to do a more complicated modelling challenge and this one certainly delivered.  

It took quite a while and I eventually had to decide on an end point so did not quite get to the level of finish I had thought I would but it was diminishing returns as I modelled smaller and smaller parts.  

I used geonodes to make the chain but had to apply it to animate the chain. Could not figure out a way to animate it otherwise.  The chain was on a curve constraint. 

To animate the bike I used the rigacar addon but only applied it to the two wheels. 

I used drivers for the cranks and pedals 

After working so hard on the model I wanted to work with it and took a few different approaches for animation.  One was a 2D /3D mixture. I painted grass and sunflowers on different layers and then animated the growth cycle in Blender importing the .[ng s as image layers.  The animation was edited in DaVinci Resolve.  

    I have had an Adobe cloud subscription for the past few years and have always felt I was fighting the software- the constant fidely updates and crashes meant I had pretty much done all my Photoshop work in CS6 of late.  As for Premier Pro I just never got comfortable with the work flow.  So rather that paying upwards of €750 this year I bought DaVinci and the Steam version of Substance Painter and still had change leftover.  So far I am impressed with DaVinci. 

The other animation was on a stage in Blender where I animated the rig and played alot with lighting. 

The final animation

A breakdown of the animation

You can see better quality on my website here https://dertypaws.com/archives/portfolio/e-bike-3d-model-animation/

Latest Showreel

 

Put together a reel of my most recent 3D work.  This was all done in Blender and has client work and some personal work.  The personal projects are explorations of various Blender systems and of late has been alot of geometry nodes stuff. It looks like the mechanics for geo nodes have been settled on and is now worth spending time to explore and learn.  

I have been creating 2D work as well mostly technical illustrations and have played around with using 3D to help with that.  The weakest part of that workflow is relying on freestyle export to obtain vector graphics. 

I hve though about creating  some videos to show how some of this work was created.  If there is some shot that you are curious about let me know and I will try and answer. 

Snowy Cone

Click to open video on Vimeo

 

Had an opportunity to try out the revamped Geometry nodes in Blender 3.0.  I had done pieces of work with them during the year but the final version took a different approach and seems more intuitive.  This means that making more complex systems is a little easier.  

The other thing I wanted to push in this work was the lighting.  

The cone was built on a bezier curve with curves instanced on points along it.  Kernals were then arrayed along the curves. 

This meant that size, density and array angles could be modified.  In the animation everything was driven by frame number.  

The holly was built off of 2 leaf arrangements.  Growth was on a circle and was controlled by an empty. 

Stars were an icosphere with voronoi texture added.  Everything was inside it and then inside a volumetric cube. 

I rendered in Eevee so took advantage of a more stylised but atmospheric look.  

Edited in Premier Pro because I paid a whopping amount for the priviledge of accessing their software for another year so tried out some effects including some lens flare using assets made in Blender.  

Added the premade cones. 

Text was created in Blender converted to mesh and added an explosion and ran it backwards.   

Music was form a site called  https://freemusicarchive.org/  Lightblow - Sunlight under CC 4.0.

And that was it.  Took a while to make as I fumbled learning alot of new stuff but got there.

Put any questions you have in the comments.