I am currently working on perhaps the largest animated project of my life so far—plus some day job to pay the inflated bills, I guess. With 2 jobs, though, it is becoming increasingly apparent that I can’t overwhelm myself with all these extra personal projects and I should give my undivided attention to my main project so that I can get it done faster, rather than juggle several at once and end up taking longer than I should with all of them.

Thus it is with great dismay, sadness, madness, indigestion and ingrown toenails that I have to be the bad guy and say I won’t upload here or anywhere else until my project is done, and because it is so ambitious I can’t tell you when it will be done and I will be free to upload that project plus upload more frequently in general until I myself know for sure it will be done. It might not be a big deal for the patient among you, but I think I have kind of set an expectation on Newgrounds that I will upload frequently in the last couple of years and I need to make people aware that, if I want to do more high-quality animations as opposed to just sketches and quick illustrations, I need to prioritize quality over quantity (posting one or two polished animations a year fit for the Movie Portal as opposed to a ton of doodles of varying quality) and focusing on only one project and medium/software so that I specialize in something.

I don’t know, maybe I’m over-thinking it. Naturally my more polished and “good” stuff tends to be more popular even if people have to wait longer, but at the same time I don’t want people to think I’m “dead” just because my current project requires me to focus and go quiet on the Internet for up to a year at a time. I guess the important thing is to temper my audience’s expectations and do a better job setting my priorities so that I can actually get big projects done. I’ll upload some of the smaller stuff I did recently before I came to this realization that I should focus more to tide you over. And it’s not like I’m not going to stop visiting here on my breaks and liking everyone else’s stuff, it’s just that I won’t upload anything myself until I finish this one big project. And of course, I can’t tell you what exactly it is I’m working on until I’m completely done, but I can easily promise that it will be more entertaining and creative than anything I’ve ever posted since I started my Newgrounds account!

See you when I see you…

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD. GRAB A SANDWICH FIRST.

Maybe it's because I've been a shut-in long before the pandemic and will likely still be one in some (increasingly-hard-to-believe) future where I no longer have to think about masks, but my 2021 wasn't the worst year of my life and was certainly better than my 2020. That's not to say there weren't personal disappointments and even tragedies for me this year, as well as concerns about the state of US politics and democracy, but none of them directly had anything to do with COVID-19 and would have still happened in any given year prior to the pandemic. In fact, if it weren't for the new Omicron variant suddenly re-activating my "worry-wart" nature, I would say I actually finished off 2021 strong with getting a new day job, plus a long-term freelance animation project and wrapping up the year with this lovely 3D sculpt commission I got from FlikkiShassArt:

Deactivating my Twitter account back in April and my Facebook/Instagram account in August or September also helped improve my mood quite a bit. I do want to make my art as easy to find online as possible, but the constant "culture war" bickering on more those two more-mainstream sites really demotivated me from making art to the point where even just quickly uploading my art and leaving took nerves of steel, so I bit the bullet and "cancelled" myself from those sites before anybody else could. Facebook was kind of dying with the younger generation, anyway, and I'm pretty sure you can't use either site uninhibited without getting an account, not like how you can browse Newgrounds, Deviant, Ko-fi, YouTube, ArtStation or any other sites without an account, so I don't think getting rid of those accounts made much of a dent on my discoverability anyway.

But anyway, on to the resolutions that will hopefully improve my art career regardless of the world's state by the end of this year:

• I will simplify my art style for the sake of those of you with weaker Internet speeds/"TikTok" attention spans, which includes uploading at smaller, more manageable resolutions and not using noisy, busy textures unless necessary. Like most aspiring 3D artists, I fell into the trap of making "This will be Graphics in 2013"-type pieces and my recent commission from FlikkiShashArt gave me a much-needed reminder that, unless I'm making photo-realistic VFX, simpler color textures are generally better.
• Focusing...focusing...I will try to specialize more this year and hopefully be a "master" at one thing instead of just merely being competent at a lot of things. It's no secret that I want to work in the LA animation industry, so while I want to do my best to preserve 2D frame-by-frame animation I do need to get much, much better at 3D modeling specifically to even stand a chance in Burbank because there are basically ZERO 2D jobs nowadays, thus most of my posts here will likely be 3D models and sculpts from now on. However, the current super-secret freelance animation project that I'm working is 2D frame-by-frame, so those who followed me specifically for 2D stuff will still have at least that to look forward to in...2024 or so...
• Quality over Quantity--maybe this happens to a lot of artists who are also Sonic the Hedgehog fans, but in the past I was more interested in building my social media presence through a large quantity of uploads instead of just making a few quality pieces a year. This of course results in inconsistent quality where one of my pieces may turn out to be as beloved as Sonic 2, OR it turns out to be an insulting mess like Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric (I think Sonic '06 is over-hated for the most part), but most of the time it is just aggressively-mediocre noise like Sonic 3D Blast or Sonic & The Black Knight. My super-busy schedule going into 2022 gives me a perfect opportunity to try a more "Super Mario-esque" approach of going quiet for a while, but then uploading a potential modern classic when you least expect it.
• Finally, spread some much-needed positivity and good vibes--obviously I can't promise that our world leaders and their loyal followers will be less petty, that climate change will be solved, or even that the world will be vaccinated to the point where COVID variants will no longer be a society-altering issue, like the cold or the flu, let alone eradicated entirely like smallpox, but I can try to distract you from the news with funny-looking character designs. As I pondered leaving Twitter, I realized how inherently stupid it is to try to have a good-faith discussions on touchy issues on websites that either severely limit your character count or is filled with rude trolls that respond with "TL;DR." When you think about it, the only thing social media is good for is easy-to-digest art and videos and maybe funny jokes if you're more of a writer-type--how Twitter and Facebook in particular became infamous for political bickering when they are not even well-suited for thoughts that take more than 3 words to express is beyond me. But anyway, I'll probably avoid commenting unless I'm super-impressed with a piece to avoid potentially starting another flame war and focus more on uploading characters and liking other's stuff in an attempt to at least make portions of the community less anxiety-inducing. If we're stuck inside waiting for rich people to fix the world, we might as well try to make the Internet more chill in comparison while we wait, right?

I have no idea why I’m getting so many followers this past week, but thank you so much!

I made this “T-Posed” sculpt of Mr. Needle (my OC) during my work’s lunch breaks. Just on my phone via the Nomad app, I have sculpted a high-poly character, textures with basic PBR colors, created the lighting setup, and tested several post-processing effects like Ambient Occlusion and Film Grain to hide the fact (as best as I possibly can) that he’s not rendered realistically through ray tracing—yet.

Now I still have a ton of stuff to do in Blender before I can even begin to animate Mr. Needle, but the fact of the matter is that I can model, texture, light, and in certain cases UV map a character on my phone (in Battery Saver mode, no less), and that is seriously going to help me out whenever I want to make art, but I’m too busy or physically tired to even boot up my laptop and Blender. Nomad Sculpt is objectively the best thing to come out of the year 2020(!).

I am not a big fan of the way Ko-fi overly-compresses my images when I upload them, even when compared to Twitter's infamous compression. I am also concerned that Ko-fi is not equipped to compete with bigger alternatives like Patreon, and some people don't seem to like that it relies solely on PayPal as a payment option (although my own father, who is not very computer-literate outside of basic word processing and email-checking for work, was able to give me money through Ko-fi one time without having his own PayPal account).

It's probably best if I just prioritize uploading on Newgrounds (and maybe also YouTube for the occasional full-blown animated cartoon) and, not absolutely get rid of Ko-fi like I did with Twitter and Facebook, but just use it as a "tip jar" and not bother with uploading there--I'll just upload my art here and provide a link to Ko-fi in the description or something. I am in a good place right now with a "pay the bills" job and some freelance art and animation work, too, so it's not like I need to rely on Ko-fi for income or even use social media in general right now for anything more serious than "I want to upload some of my work when I have the free time and see how people react."

Nonetheless, like my barely-there YouTube account, Ko-fi is still there as a "necessary evil" to make sure my work is easy for employers or clients to find on the Internet, even if I don't outright enjoy the site like I do with Newgrounds, ArtStation or ZBrushCentral (thank you for not being like the crazies on Twitter or the wannabe-conspiracy-theorists on Facebook, btw). If you want to support my work, but I'm not open for commissions at the moment, you can still "buy me a cup of coffee" on Ko-fi.

My Ko-fi

I kind of feel bad about my last post being all…”rant-y.” None of you need any extra anxiety in your lives from the Internet and since I have made that post, I have gone from struggling to find work to getting swamped with a reasonable “pay the bills” job plus at least two long-term freelance art/commission opportunities, as well as unfortunately having to say “no” to all these other new opportunities that suddenly popped up, because I’m only one person!

Let me make it up to you with a picture of my Mom’s cats being the living embodiments of a Hallmark card:

I've had to turn down quite a few job offers recently simply because they couldn't guarantee that I would be paid for my work. I can understand animation jobs being hesitant to have me working even an unpaid internship, since I have zero connections, would have to move to Burbank, and need to be trained to use software that my computer can't seem to be able to download (although I have tried my absolute hardest to prove my experience in similar cheap/open source software is easily transferrable to the likes of ZBrush, Maya and 3DS Max), but recently a lot of interviewers have seemingly stringed me along into dead-end volunteer (aka "slave") work, even if I made it clear from the start that I need a job to pay the bills and cannot work for free, even if it's a minimum-wage job that most wouldn't even consider outside of getting paid.

Basically what I'm saying is that I need a way to make SOME money while I continue to work on a freelance animation and find a job where the interviewer doesn't forget along the way that I am a 27-year-old grown man with lots of retail/customer service experience in particular and thus can't afford to work at a job that isn't willing to pay me enough for gas, water, electricity, etc.

Until that mythical "job that values your work enough to pay money for your efforts" finally comes along, I will do small, quick 2D art projects for as little as $2:

...or 3D sculpts (in Nomad or Blender, since I'm only allowed to use ZBrushCoreMini for non-commercial practice) for as low as $3:

These prices may seem excessively cheap for some, but the point is that I need ANY money, regardless of amount, to maintain some level of adult independence, and until minimum-wage opportunities stop taking all this time away from my animation and making me prepare for multiple interviews only to pull the "we can't pay you, but we'll give you EXPOSURE" card, even at jobs that I have worked at in the past and have solid proof that I can be trusted to work for a salary, I do need a little extra help to avoid running out of money entirely. Sorry if this seems more like a vent, I just would be EXTREMELY grateful if you take me up on this offer and while I can't do big projects at this time I would work very hard to make these little projects live up to your standards. You would think having worked in some form of retail and customer service for 10 years of my life, most recently at a grocery store until June of this past year, I would have at least a little bit of an easier time finding another minimum-wage job, but for whatever reason so far many of my interviews have been dead-ends simply because the employers want me to do free work and "internships" like they're a gateway to a big-shot studio like Disney or Naughty Dog. Okay, okay, I'm done. Just pay me as little as $2 for some work from me, and I'll at least not be homeless before I finally find a job willing to pay me and be more grateful than you can possibly imagine...

I’ve made a game! Well, sort of…

I’ve been spending some of my weekends dabbling with an app called Struckd, and I personally think it’s the closest thing to a 3D RPG Maker, among other genres—they even have a template for Sonic-style platformer! It’s really easy to use for someone like me who does NOT enjoy coding/programming, but does enjoy level design and writing bonkers dialogue for characters. You can play the fruits of my labors, entitled “ButtChrono Chapter 1,” right now if you download the app on your phone. You don’t even need to sign up for an account unless you want to make games yourself, and you can save your progress!

Play ButtChrono Chapter 1 Now

I even quickly put together an overwrought Hollywood-style trailer on YouTube for it!

Enjoy!

I don't want celebrate TOO early yet, but I am proud to announce that I have been accepted for an internship at a start-up company! Not a horrid job in retail or groceries like my previous job, but a remote Blender animation job that actually uses my skills in computer art! This is an ideal situation for me!

It will last 5 months, but potentially lead to a job at the company. I am still committed to uploading some small art here, on Ko-fi and Linkedin, for every Saturday for the rest of 2021 and I have all of the pieces finished and ready--meaning I shouldn't miss any Saturday even if something comes up, other than maybe uploading a day early on a Friday on occasion. However, I will focus all of my artistic energy for the next 5 months solely on that internship and hopefully turning it into a long-term, paid job, so my uploads may dry up quite a bit in early 2022. Also, I will not be accepting commission and animation requests for a while and possibly even longer if I finally achieve my dream of being paid a (relatively) stable income doing art at a studio, because I will spend most of my remaining free time chipping away at big personal projects and not really worry about maintaining my social media presence anymore.

Rest assured, though, that I may go quiet for the best possible reason of being paid to do what I love, and that when I do upload here or elsewhere again, it will only be highly-polished and weird independent art that will be worth the incredibly long wait!

Also, in the short term I've been avoiding social media simply because I don't want to see any spoilers for Deltarune Chapter 2 until I finish the game myself. You understand, right?

UPDATE: Finished Deltarune Chapter 2. Go ahead and draw your sick Susie fanart like a real BIG SHOT!

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Thrash and I am an animator that specializes in traditional frame-by-frame animation and 3D modeling. I am available for work and my main tools of the trade include my iPad Pro (for 2D art) and a RTX 3060 laptop with Blender, B4Artists, Cycles/Eevee, Paint.net, SculptGL, and any other tools that will help me produce quality 3D art in the most efficient manner possible! My art tends to be stylized and I have a preference for drawing or sculpting hideous creatures similar to the ones you would see in "gross-ups" from Ren and Stimpy or SpongeBob SquarePants. I also have experience with writing comedy, sound design, and voice acting. Here are my prices:

2D (Single Character, Simplistic BG):

Sketch: $7

Black and White (B&W) Line Art Only: $15

Line Art + B&W Sketchy Shading: $25

Basic Color (No Shading or B&W Sketchy Shading): $35

Color + Cel Shading: $45

Painterly/Fully Rendered: $75

2D Animation (frame by frame): Contact me

3D (Character in Public Domain Sketchfab BG):

iPad/SculptGL sculpt (no rigging-friendly topology, but can be completed quickly): $50

Animation-ready 3D model: $100

3D Model with basic skeleton rig: $200

3D Model with basic skeleton rig/shape keys (.blend file format only): $300

3D Animation: Contact me

I generally only feel comfortable doing SFW art (outside of comedic Adult-Swim-like violence), so if you want NSFW art, I am not the one you want. I am at least comfortable doing characters that are sexy in a mainstream way (think Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit), including female BBWs and body-building men (although I am not gay or bi, I have far more experience with male anatomy).

I hope I can be of service and I will be more than happy to work with you!

My Portfolio Site

My Ko-fi