I didn't do anything productive today, besides laundry, so I made this animated gif before bed. It's from the pictures I took at the mural at the end of each night, except for a bunch I didn't take after the community paint day.

Today I posted my last SCU & CZU lightning complex fire updates on Instagram. I'd been making animated gifs from screenshots of the affected area, using Google Maps, since I became aware of the fire on Mount Hamilton almost two weeks ago. I started making animations for the SCU and CZU affected areas and evacuation maps a few days later. Luckily, after a couple days, the fire stopped moving closer to our home and after a couple weeks the evacuations areas nearby were lifted or reduced. The SCU Fire containment is currently at 60%, compared to 5% 13 days ago. I feel like I can finally stop worrying about the fire coming closer and evacuating as long as we don't get more of the high temperatures, dry weather and lighting storms that caused these fires. I'll still keep an eye on things but start unpacking my go-bag & stuff. I should put together a proper kit to have ready for future emergencies incase these wildfires start becoming a regular thing.

Yup!

I've been cleaning house these last few days. Knocking out some to-dos, clearing out email and deleting old shit. Today I came across the flyer for my first, and only, solo art show. (October 1st, 2011 at 8:00 PM,) an animated gif I made from a drawing (Plantimal,) and a crappy picture of the Hoverboard prop I made for my Marty Mcfly Halloween costume many-many moons ago (that's where Frankie Mcfly came from)

And in other news:

• The date for my next scheduled art show is Friday, May 1, 2020
• I've added a Contact page & form to this website

I finished building my dancing robot in After Effects. I need to figure out keep it from getting blurry after I export the video. Not bad for my second animation tho :)

Today I ate breakfast. Animated the arms on my little robot guy. Cooked my "household-famous" lentils, but was light on the lentils. Ate the lentils plus more food with the family. Watched the new Rick & Morty episodes. Read a couple comics and ate more food. The only thing left to do is post this blog entry and sleep off this food.

My friend Amanda emailed me yesterday and asked if I'd be interested in designing a graphic for an award her organization will be presenting in a couple weeks. This morning we discussed details over the phone. I put together a couple designs today and will work on at least one more to submit for consideration. More on that later. I also finished designing my robot in Illustrator. Tomorrow I'll import it into After Effects to animate. 

I was dragging ass all day. The most productive thing I did was buy groceries. The next most productive thing was go over some basic tutorials in After Effects. The tutorial, on object parenting, had all the resources and instructions was within the app. When I was done I started drawing objects in Illustrator to make my own animation. I'll try and knock it out tomorrow.

I fired up After Effects tonight after watching some tutorials and made this little turd. It looked all crispy & clean before I exported it. Apparently there's a lot I gotta learn.

I watched a few video tutorials today on how to use After Effects and InDesign. I want to create animations with After Effects for fun and to promote my brand online. InDesign is perfect for putting together zines or books, which I want to do with my Inktober drawings. Tomorrow I'll fire up After Effects and try to create something cool. I'll get to InDesign later. The Inktober zine/book project is on hold till I get the proper gear to take good photos of my drawings. 

I've been subscribing to Adobe Illustrator for a while. It cost about $21 per month. Last week I got an email from Adobe to upgrade to All-Apps for $30/mo. I think regular is $53/mo. I was already thinking of adding Photoshop, which is $10/mo, so I hopped on this deal. Today I downloaded Photoshop as well as Indesign and After Effects. I'm familiar with Photoshop but I've never used the other two. Indesign is for creating layouts, which might come in handy, and After Effects is for creating animations, which looks like it could be lots of fun. I became interested in After Effects after watching videos created by this guy named Cyriak on Youtube. I want to learn to make animations like these: