I have recently quit my current job so that I could make significantly more time to practice 3D modeling and hopefully develop my skills for an art and animation job by the fall. This also means I will make no money until I get another job, so I would highly appreciate it if you visited my Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/jeffreythrash), where I will upload most of my practice renders for a while. If you like my stuff, please consider donating some money every once in a while there.

My Ko-fi

I finally got around to watching Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which became Robotech when it came to North America and also India, apparently) through dubious means, at least until Big West legally re-releases the entire Macross franchise or whatever they plan to do with it now they fully own the entire series, at which point I just watch it all again legally!

I am telling you this because soon my fetish for 1980’s/‘90s frame-by-frame animated mechs will consume me and all my future art will consist of nothing more than robots, love triangles and idol J Pop, similar to when I discovered Neon Genesis Evangelion in 2019 and Gurren Lagann before that. You have been warned.

I must have followed at least 5 new artists today alone. It's gotten to the point now where I unfortunately cannot give all the people I follow my full undivided love unless I delegate my overly-generous 5-star reviews and pathetic excuses for jokes to paid workers.

Please stop exposing me to exciting new artists, Mr. Fulp. I need time to work on my own Newgrounds art and you are just feeding my addiction to cool drawings...

Is it okay if I post quick animations in the Art section of Newgrounds (not the Movie section, I’ve learned the hard way the audience there prefers content that is at least as long and as professional as an old Tom and Jerry short, which is fine)? Naturally, for the sake of getting a job, I will still have to work months on end on a single polished, portfolio-worthy project, but maybe in between I can quickly fulfill my primal urge to quickly draw a quick animation cycle of a dog-baseball-lawnmower mowing the lawn like back in my Flipnote Studio days as a teen?

Posting more often would certainly be good for the “algorithm” that will hopefully make employers more likely to see my more polished stuff, and the fact of the matter is that, like most artists, I don’t want to just make “marketable” and trend-following stuff all the time, sometimes I just want to make something quick and weird with complete disregard as to whether it fits the “Disney” or “Dreamworks” style.

This will also mean I will be drawing 2D animations more, as I’m not Beeple and 3D animation and rigging takes too much time and mathematical prowess for experimental, almost-daily posts. Some people may be happy with more 2D frame-by-frame stuff in 2021...

After the admittedly-disappointing reception to my previous 2 animations across social media, I think I'm going to have to learn to be more patient and spend significantly more time on my 3D renders and animations. Basically, I'm going to try to spend around 3 months on still images and 6 months-to-a-year on animations, which means I will be a lot less active here outside of appreciating other people's art. The trade-off, though, is that hopefully my stuff will be FAR more polished when they do come out, and let's be honest, your favorite artists tend to be the ones that upload at a similar rate that JonTron uploads videos or we get a new "proper" Mario and Zelda game from Nintendo--The wait is annoying and tortuous, but when their beautiful art DOES eventually come out, your faith in humanity as a whole is temporarily restored! Likewise, I am capable of far more polished works than what I have been putting out so far, but I need to give myself a lot more time to actually polish my raw ideas in the first place.

I would also like to make more portfolio-worthy pieces so that I can finally get out of my retail/grocery job that is making me too physically exhausted most days to even sit up and load up Blender on my laptop for 30 minutes. Don't even get me started on the Karens and "Florida Men" (but in California) that actively go out of their way to make me as miserable as them, or how my boss keeps increasing my hours against my wishes so that I have to deal with them more and more...

Another thing I might work on is toning down the post-processing effects in my art. Renderers like Blender's Cycles and Eevee already produce some nice effects right out of the box (when done right) and I have a ton of easy 1-click LUTs that can easily achieve the final look I want, so adding tons of other effects like Bloom and even more Color Correction than what the LUT already achieved on top of all that other stuff results in a very gaudy-looking final result, as I have come to realize when looking at my last few submissions here. See you in 3-12 months!

Working on a new animation on the ol’ iPad.

I’ve noticed on Newgrounds that I see a lot of fanart of franchises that I absolutely adored as a kid (and now), but are not super relevant to the younger generations, such as Klonoa or Um Jammer Lammy. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that there is still a “safe space” of sorts on the Internet for people that are ancient by TikTok/Twitter standards, but how am I supposed to understand the FLOSSing and the drips and the “red is sus” and the Cancel Culture if I spend most of my time on this surprisingly pleasant site?

I know I’ve said that I would use YouTube a lot less, but I did upload my latest video, Pupper de Poppers, in an attempt to see if it’s still worth the trouble uploading to that site (as opposed to my occasional gameplay videos and low-effort memes that seem to get thousands more views there). It did not—even on my Ko-fi, which I am still gradually building my audience on, I’ve gotten a handful more views on Puppers (in GIF form) than on my 10-year-old YouTube channel. Of course, not only is Newgrounds more animator-friendly, I’m more likely to get feedback (constructive or otherwise) that will help me do better next time.

Therefore, I will narrow down my list of social media sites to consistently upload to include Newgrounds, Ko-fi, and Twitter (as much as I hate Twitter, people seem to appreciate my stuff that actually takes time and effort to publish there). I’ll just use YouTube strictly for fun and occasionally upload videos of obscure games I like or something, but otherwise it doesn’t seem worth it to dedicate any significant amount of time to it that would be better spent on improving my animations.

Popping up tomorrow!

Still chipping away at that 3D character I’m working on for my portfolio. Patience, young Padawan.