Friends. My friends onna Intanet. And real friends. Welcome to the house of PAIN. Jks. Thanks for reading.

Some new things!

First up, I designed this mascot dude for the first ever ‘South African Adaptive Surfing’ championship that took place in Muizenberg, Cape Town. Here’s this bunny:

Kiff. And then I designed a sticker set for iOS 10! Funimalz, available on the App Store!

Aaand then, I inked and coloured some stickers for Triggerfish’s ‘Khumba’ sticker set, sketched up Lorraine Alvarez Posen. I don’t know if they’re available yet in the App Store:

And then my bro and I collab’d to make this single design for his new song with Josh Wantie, which is a kiff song. My bro did all the concept work, I just neatened it up:

Then I did this Medical Chronicle cartoon:

Then I’m busy laying out a book that my mom Susan Scott and her friend and collaborator Susan E. Schwartz, Ph.D wrote called ‘Aging & Becoming’, it’s pretty much done and looks like a great book. Been an interesting challenge because traditionally my type layout skills haven’t been that hot, but, I’m learning. I followed this great tutorial on how to lay out a book properly and set it up the right way in Indesign. I figured I may as well learn how to do it right from the start:

Then I got a job from this Boston / US based company that’s making 10 second shorts for another company for SnapChat. I gave the boarding and character design work to James Wolfaardt and my bro did the music and sfx. I animated it. This is the result:

Then I did a review of my Wacom Cintiq 22″ HD vs. my olde Wacom Cintiq 12″:

Then my Pac-Man vid Carl Douglas and I did for Take has clocked over half a million views! Rad:

I’ve also put up a couple tutorials for using Toon Boom Harmony Premium 14. I bought the upgrade recently and have to admit, I’ve been loving it. Has sped up my workflow a lot, the node view has made comp’ing way easier, the top light is a life-saver for dimming other layers when onion-skinning, I take my hat off to Toon Boom because I’ve slated their previous stuff, I bought TB Animate 2 and it frustrated the heck out of me.

THEN I’ve pretty much finished a brand new Goldfish music video! Hopefully it’ll be released soon. That’s been on the cooker for a while now and most of the production was done this month (it’s been a busy month).

Crunch time weeeoooeee!!! 🙂 going kiff.

A photo posted by mikdog (@mikdog) on Oct 29, 2016 at 12:52pm PDT

A video posted by mikdog (@mikdog) on Oct 25, 2016 at 12:55am PDT

Full list of contributors to this vid on release. Has been a pleasure working with others on this.

AND THEN tomorrow I fly to Joburg, and then off to Mauritius to join Free Lives who are busy making videogames there! Rad! You can check the video documentary they’ve made about the experience thus far here:

I also finished making this short for some US comedians but will post that once they put it up.

In other news, put in an offer for a house three times, offer wasn’t accepted. Planning to spend January working on Bru & Boegie stuff, the voices we recorded for this new Beatboxing Dave short are (I think) hilarious, and I recommend a free program called ‘Post Haste‘ for generating a consistent folder structure before you start projects to make backing stuff up easier and general workflow better, and I’ve been enjoying this (paid for) app called ‘Paste‘ for Mac that lets you keep 500 or more ‘copy’ histories, you know every time you CMD+C to copy something then accidentally copy over it with something else and think ‘ah man’? Now you can copy loads of things and paste selectively. So obvious that this should be incorporated into an OS.

Also, shout-out to some hardware: my 2011 iMac that is still running like a beast. It earns me bucks by being fast and responsive and reliant, it’s a maxed out custom-order iMac with a fancy graphics card, and SSD and HDD and 16GB memory and has done me so well ever since I’ve had it – I can run Photoshop smoothly while Premiere’s rendering video and loads of other apps are open at the same time, without it breaking a sweat. Great machine. I found it off Gumtree from a guy who had just taken order of it after waiting the 6-8 weeks delivery it takes for a custom order, and he just got a job at the Apple store so he was able to get an even bigger discount for himself.

My RCT 2000 VAS UPS, a recent addition. I plug my Wacom Cintiq and iMac into it and when there’s a power outage it kicks in automatically and keeps things running, allowing me enough time to save my work and power down properly. Has paid for itself very quickly. I’d consider a UPS a must for anyone owning an iMac.

Wacom Cintiq 22″. I was skeptical about the outlay to get this thang but it is so kiff and WAY better than my Cintiq 12″. Amanda told me she’s spend anything if it helps speed up work, and she’s right. As my friend and ex-boss Andy Wood used to say:

“Don’t Neglect Your Tools.”