I created so much animation in the last year that it only made sense to update my showreel to feature it all! There is now no longer stuff any older than 2017 in here, compared to my previous showreels that still had stuff going as far back as 2011!

Created with Deadline Communications for Love Essex, What a Waste it’s a superb marriage of puppetry, set design, animation and voice talent! One of the coolest projects I’ve ever had the privilege to work on! I animated the eyes and mouths, if which there are around 1400 in total! The film can be watched above, and check out the films IMDB page for some production photos of the puppetry!

It’s that time of year again, time to look over the last twelve months of creative productivity! This was my busiest year for freelance animation EVER, with six projects all pretty much one after the other, some of which lasted several months! For the first time in over ten years animation actually felt like my main job! Read on for full details on each month!

January:

I kickstarted the year with an attempt to keep myself busy (haha) by coming up with weekly personal illustrations to work on while livestreaming. This included a couple based on childhood toys, followed by fan art of games I was playing at the time. 

I also started my first freelance gig of the year about visiting a recycling center for Love Essex, which was finished and released in early Feb.

February:

I continued the weekly art streams (though I did skip one week while I was wrapping up the animation work) that included more Balan Wonderworld fan art and another nostalgia trip based around old TV game show Fun House which was seen and approved by Pat Sharp himself!

I also made some Valentine’s day silliness for CherryT and with her help also created this ridiculous Art Data-Blast video featuring all of my art over the years with a 90′s TV inspired intro.

March:

A big turning point for my livestreams arrived here when I decided to create a PNGTuber using Veadotube Mini! I livestreamed the majority of my experimentation and process and the cutdown videos about it became some of my biggest hits on YouTube yet! Going forward I would now use this animated avatar instead of a webcam, though this would actually end up being the last month of the year that I’d have any time to livestream because…

April:

..April would be the start of one of the biggest projects: six one-minute animated shorts for the Scottish Illegal Money Lending Unit about the dangers of loan sharks. This month was spent mostly storyboarding most of the films and completing the first one.

At the same time concepts were being developed for another six-minute piece of animation that I would need to juggle alongside the above project over the coming months!

I should also mention here life-wise I changed my daily job from working in a cinema to…working in a smaller, closer to home cinema!

May:

This month was mostly spent storyboarding for the second big project and waiting around for approval while the Loan Shark project was put on hold, so while I had a bit of spare time I gave my website a new lick of paint (including some new art of old characters) and made several illustrations including my favorite Eurovision 2022 act (now my most popular Tumblr post ever for some reason!), joining in on the Catoon Network CMYK art fad, and fan art of a fellow PNGTuber. I was also commissioned by Jadypie to create some cute animal Twitch emotes!

June:

After two pieces of quick art including another obscure game character and another excuse to draw Amy Rose, me and CherryT took a couple days away to visit the theme park Alton Towers, which I made a travel vlog about! 

The 2nd film for the Stop Loan Sharks series was completed this month and this was when the 2nd big project was given the official go ahead! The six-and a half minute long film has yet to be released and might end up staying in the private sector but all I can say is it has a similar subject matter and art style to the Annabelle’s Journey film I made last year.

I also drew these guys for some reason.

July:

This month was almost exclusively knuckling down to get the un-released film fully animated. Much like the Annabelle film this was a massive amount of hand-drawn animation squeezed into just over one month! I also made time to do this commission for PCWzrd.

August:

With that long, time-consuming project out of the way it was time to jump back into the Loan Shark films. Two were completed in April and June but I still had four to go, so this month and most of September was day-to-day animating again!

September:

I was getting these Loan Shark films done at a rate of roughly 10 days per film, though the last one took a little longer as it was yet to be storyboarded until now. This project was finally complete midway through the month and released near the end!

Somewhere in the middle of all this I managed to fit in some livestreams of the Sonic Fan Games Expo and some reactions to some gaming events.

In the last week of the month I worked on a pretty exciting commission that I need to stay tight-lipped about for now!

October:

This month was started by wrapping up the above commission and jumping into another, thankfully much shorter 1 minute animation that has also not yet seen the light of day, but when it does I shall update this article! As soon as that was done another big project approached!

November:

This freelance gig started at the end of October and lasted all through November and up until the middle of December! Again I can’t really talk about this one until it’s out but this one I know when: the 9th of January, so stay tuned for that! 

There was a break at the end of November when me and CherryT went to Birmingham for a few days to finally go to a concert we booked back in early 2020 that kept getting delayed!

Mid-month I also quickly doodled up my OC a couple times.

December:

This last project ended up taking longer than I anticipated at around seven or eight weeks total, most likely because it’s quite unlike anything I have done before (oooh intrigue!). After what felt like roughly nine months of almost non-stop animating the last half-month of the year was spent last-minute Christmas shopping and finally chilling out a bit, including going to a local video games expo for the weekend! The last piece of art I did this year was for the Newgrounds Secret Santa.

That was an intense year! I can’t wait till you get to see the stuff that’s not out there yet and in terms of 2023 I do already have a couple things queued up for January so we’ll see how it goes I guess!

Tonight at 6pm (UK BST time) on my Twitch channel: I will be checking out a whole boatload of indie and fan game demos featured at this years SAGExpo!

UPDATE: Doing a second stream for SAGExpo tonight at the same time! See you there!

At 6pm (UK Time) over on my Twitch channel! I will be checking out the Splatoon 3 Splatfest World Premiere! This will be my first livestream since March as I've been really busy with freelance animation work, but hope to continue streaming when I can from now on, at least once or twice a week. See you there perhaps!

The blue bird site is starting to smell a little musky, so I've set up a Mastodon account just in case things go to hell (or rather get deeper into hell than they already are). I'm on the Socel instance which is a currently pretty small one made for the animation scene. If anyone here would like to join this instance here's a link!

The whole instances thing is a little confusing at first but basically it doesn't really matter which one you join as they can all interact with each other. Not planning to leave Twitter just yet but we'll see how things shake out I guess.

Thank you for all the awesome feedback for my PNGTuber character so far! It has really spurred me on to create even more poses and expressions for him! In this video I show off a few I created between streams and work on two more as well as show the inspiration for one of the poses!

Yesterday I experimented with Veadotube Mini to create my very own PNGTuber! Check out the video about for my current progress!

I have been posting my stupid art on the internet for just over 20 years now, so here is a quick montage of most of those illustrations, animations, doodles and comics in just two minutes, featuring over 1400 images! Blink and you'll miss it! Cherry Terrier is here to present to you the best and easiest way to browse through all the artwork!

Thanks go out to Pcwzrd13 for hosting the Dreamcast browser friendly website!

I would love to see other artists here on YouTube have a crack at their own art datablasts featuring their history of work!

Here's some freelance animation that kept me busy for a chunk of last month just released!