doodle.zone turns 5 I was talking to a friend of mine about doodle.zone and realized that I was coming up on the 5 year anniversary of this project. After I got my first iPad with an Apple Pencil, I started drawing before going to bed. I would draw something weird, and then send it to Kaitlin and go to sleep. Over time, this evolved to sending it to multiple people. Eventually I realized that I was wasting a lot of time manually sending these doodles around when I could be sleeping. So, I built ... Read more
It’s been about a year since my last email. I got so wrapped up working on different characters & modeling different stuff, that I totally forgot to send an update of what I’m working on. Turns out I got a lot done. That first kickflipping frog guy was just one of many characters I made this year. I ended up animating a few of them, and spent a ton of time just building different stuff. Much of it was dumped into this backyard I worked on for a while. Something I realized the other day was t... Read more
Hello! Character animation has always been a thing I’ve wanted to do, but was always intimidated by. Either I wasn’t confident enough in my abilities in some software, or never felt like I could wrap my head around rigging a complex character. It just seemed like too big of a project to take on, and I would ultimately be disappointed with whatever I could do. So after spending some time learning the ins and outs of Blender, I decided to take an honest stab at animating something. I spent the... Read more
I’ve never really had a public portfolio of my design work. I think for the most part, that was because I’ve had a job that I liked. Recently I realized it’s actually because I want to do so much more than just design work. So, over the last couple of weeks I built a new stublag.com that collects all of the illustration & animation work I’ve done over the last couple of years. It’s been a lot of fun to see it all in one place. Originally I bought jokey domains like render.zone to start... Read more
Greetings from the Western States Pact. Someone mentioned to me that it’s been almost a year since the last time I sent out one of these. So here we go: I’m writing another long email. doodle.zone is 3 years old I started doodle.zone because I used to draw something before going to bed and then send it to Kaitlin. Then I started sending it to a handful of people. Eventually I realized “wow this is a lot of work, I could probably automate this somehow”. So I built a blog to post all of th... Read more
I told you it would be occasional edition In my last newsletter I wrote about my studio and all the cool things I was going to build. Well, unfortunately, I decided not to renew my lease at the end of July. It’s definitely a bummer, but also kind of a relief. I really wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it work, and I’m happy to move on to the next thing. I started making toys? ?? One of the best things about that studio was having access to a 3D printer. Kaitlin asked me to make her a ... Read more
Studio Updates Edition Over the last six months I have been working out of a studio, and a couple of weeks ago I took over managing it. The guy who originally ran the space took a full-time job so I’ve stepped in to keep it going. While working here I’ve realized a few things: Having a studio I actually like going to is extremely important I can actually be the person to make that space a reality So, this studio has become its own project with lots of different pieces that I can focus on. A ... Read more
After many years of kind of hating email, I turned a corner about them recently. The thing I realized was that the emails I hate are all of the notifications, unwanted newsletters and random noise you have to sift through daily. After signing up for some newsletters I have really enjoyed, I started to see the value of a nice email from someone you actually care to hear from. It’s a minor difference but that’s kind of the plan with occasional.email. An email from me every couple of weeks with... Read more