Something I posted to Facebook in 2017. 5 people seemed to have noticed.
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Creativity and Skill (Thoughts from 2017)
Friday, December 17, 2021
Comic on My YouTube Channel Experience
Art vs Artist 2021 Version And Year Summary
Something from Twitter again:
I also did a version with all the art in squares, but it doesn't show as much, so putting this version here instead.
Kind of a summary of the Visual Art year in 9 images, but there has been much more than that. Also I'm not getting any younger...
I keep a Diary and was updating it yesterday to what our main "achievements" were this year. Without mentioning the significant events in our kids lives, they are:
1) Read more Japanese language manga, in Japanese then ever before this year.
2) Wrote and recorded 5 songs and updated our music making system.
3) Was fully Vaccinated against C19
4) Got a Mobile Phone here in Japan, on a plan that doesn't cost us anything if we don't use the phone.
5) Wrote and produced more of my own comics than before.
And I though to myself, that feels good.
Saturday, December 11, 2021
DREAM: Music Video Animated in Moho Pro 12
First attempt at animating a 3 minute video using a puppet we made from our comic character of me and our original track, DREAM.
This is the whole one man band, home recording experience. Many of the comics I do are "Slice of Life", and this is too. I actually recorded the Dream track several years ago now.
1 of the 8 pages of the comic on recording my music, for example:
The comics I do are done in CorelDraw and I made the character with extra hands, mouths, eye positions and body components on separate layers. I saved the character as an illustrator fil
In illustrator I output it as a multilayer Photoshop file. That way all the components are on separate layers, but still form a complete character.
What some of those parts look like if you separate them out
That Photoshop file is brought into Moho and a skeleton and switch layers used to select 1 of n options for eyes, browse, mouth and hands. I haven't used the Moho drawing tools yet, and don't know if I will.
Moho Pro 12 is such a huge improvement over Anime Studio Pro 5 I used previously.
I made a few video segments between 74 and 300 frames at 24fps to assemble the video from. The lip synced videos had 11khz 8 bit audio of just the vocal in them to help align with the mastered music track, then muted once in the correct place.
All assembled with lyrics and title added in Movie Studio.
A more typical way to do a music video is to put the 4 different players in each corner of the screen, but that would need 4 times the amount of animated segments to work with, so I used the one shot at a time approach. Cutting on beats between clip variations makes it a bit more interesting, as the studio experience is very static.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
Freak Kitchen: Discovering Music That Speaks To You
Discovering music is such a random thing. There is so much out there, you will only ever come across a small selection.
I first head of FREAK KITCHEN around 2014 on the community TV show in Sydney Australia, GUITAR GODS AND MASTERPIECES. Not the show that would ever be on a commercial network, but I am clad they existed. Since then the Community Channel in Sydney was shut down and is now home shopping or something, You can find this on the extra channels like 7mate on occasion, and now YouTube.
What I first heard was FREAK OF THE WEEK, from their second last album. I then found their videos on YouTube, then bought the COOKING WITH PAGANS CD from Amazon USA, as it wasn't available in backwards Australia.
Loved it, and GGAM would show various Mattias guitar tutorials and videos sometimes.
Now 2 years ago I moved back to Japan, and have watched more YouTube than previously, and learnt about their back catalogue, and what they have been about. And Freak Guitar too. And I have now bought all their old CDs and their book from second hand stores here in Japan in the last 7 months or so. Become quite the fan. Even bought the T-shirt!
Only just finished reading FREAK WHEN SPOKEN TO, and it seems amazing to me that they had released 4 albums, and the drummer and bass player still couldn't make a living from music, and with other issues, quit the band. I love those early albums. JAPAN was one of the places they were popular, so why I could get all their old CDs.
My last 5 songs have been very influenced by Mattias "IA" Eklundh in so many ways. Drop C# on a Strat being one. They say things that are meaningful to me, in a metal type way. Wish I had discovered them way earlier.
Long live FREAK KITCHEN
I know there is so much music out their I would love but will never come across. But also no-one has that much time to search!
And you will note that shirt in various cartoons of me I have done in the last 6 months too....
I'm not always such a huge fan of some of his IAs wiggly harmonic lead stuff though. Technically amazing, but not always melodically musical to me. You are not going to want to hum it which I think is important.
His FREAK GUITAR albums are more that direction, and I tracked down second hand CDs of those too. Eddie Van Halen's leads are far more to my liking, even if that is not what I try and do at all.

