Now

Updated 2025-08-28

Hire Me, Let’s Make Money!

I’m based in Springfield, Missouri. I am absolutely open for work solicitations, and applying for gigs, projects, odd jobs, and even the right W2 job. I’m interested in commission and contract clients for art and animation. Also print shops, art departments, fabrication, and more.

Ongoing Projects

  • I’m working with Alison of Birdy and the Beads at various events and festivals this summer and fall to put on a booth doing DIY bead creations! Customize your own pens & keychains. Also, Lafufu dolls and more! Check out her Tiktok!
  • A forthcoming print project for Christine of Mosaica Rose Studio is in the early stages.
  • I’m writing tutorials and text documentation for this site. I’m into learning and working in readable Markdown formatting these days.
  • I’m reading all manner of tutorials to advance queued up projects.

The Garden

  • Tomatoes and basil are presently being harvested.
  • The small Jadu’i watermelon are putting on fruit as the vines grow on the fence and everywhere else, requiring I macrame a hammock or they’ll fall off the vine. The jute twine touching the fruit leaves a tan-line.
  • Chilacayote / Fig-Leaf gourd grew quite well despite the late transplant. It will allegedly bloom with a 12-13 hour photoperiod, so mid-September? Squash bug suppression requires not just a neemoil-dishsoap-water solution but sustained attention. fingers crossed I get some mature fruit before frost. The jute twine macrame square knot trellis on the fence seemed to work well for it in any case.
  • The Battiri eggplant is experiencing continued flea beetles, and no blossom has survived to fruit yet. Must respray neem frequently. I expect I’ll dig them up and try to overwinter them like peppers. After much trial and error germinating them, I concluded that the plastic dome in the sun (but not too much sun) seems more effective than the heat mat without further insulation underlay.

Queued Up Animation and Art Projects

Surface Design

I now have an Inkscape process documented for making tiled, repeating vector designs for fabric, wallpaper, and merchandise, see my recent tutorial here. This furthers a vining watermelon concept I’ve been working on but it needs quite a bit more work, meanwhile I’m really waffling on how many colors, light on dark or reverse, outlines or no, etc for a cohesive, elegant design before I spend time refining details.

Panorama Digital Painting in Blender for Web and Animation

I have a lot of work to do digitally painting 360° equirectangular panoramas, but I paused work to solve some technical debt and retool to work around severe problems with large raster canvas and brush size lag and system resource bottlenecks. Blender’s raster image layer system is not great for using in artwork either. It remains to explore addons and plugins for raster layering but I’ve mostly pivoted towards learning and adapting Blender’s Grease Pencil tool to this task. Grease Pencil’s spline-based stroke and keyframe systems should also help with animateability of art assets.

I’ll begin with redoing my Blender and Grease Pencil notes to review, but otherwise I’m basically at the stage of brush tinkering, style tests, and treatments of adapting Photo Sphere photography. As far as displaying the work, the freemium WPVR WordPress plugin does some basics, see my galleries of Photo Spheres and painted panoramas, but I’ll be seeking more advanced options in future.

Photoshop has a 360° raster painting feature these days, however whenever possible Adobe must not be relied upon.

Photogrammetry

My photo archive includes a lot of object capture feedstock for 3D software photogrammetry experiments to convert them to 3D models and texture maps, it’s been a hot minute since I spent time with Meshroom but it has a particular node procedure that needs a deep investigation to churn out clean geometry and texture, which will likely extend to a Blender pipeline.

Big Brutus Visioning

Regarding historic Big Brutus a retired, orange, 13-story electric coal shovel of West Mineral, Kansas, with which my family has much history: The museum board members are receptive to my idea I just need to put together a presentation/animation envisioning development and electrification, especially visitor vehicle charging and regulatory considerations thereof. They’re so close with excellent facilities and power/water/waste hookups for RV campers and food truck vendors with a comprehensive overnight fee, but no metering for day visitors. Make it a vehicle charging or supercharging destination, supplement a “Southeast Kansas History of Electric Power” narrative to their excellent mining history and miner’s union content, and I think you tap and develop a growing market.

Children’s Public Health Propaganda

I really enjoyed working on the Freddy Fox cartoons for Freeman and I’m keen to get back to practical and utopian messaging. PPE, aerosol transmission, and infection pathology are subject matters I’m keen to make great content for, such as more public service announcement ad spots. If Freeman or a competitor wants to pay me for one, that would be FANTASTIC. Call me! 📞

Merchandise

Print-To-Order merchandise and inexpensive home spray-paint prints with laser-cut stencils. I’m mostly anti-vinyl for apparel unless it’s for reflective paneling but I do have a couple Springfield local vendors who can do that.

Community and Hobbies

Get Thee Outdoors

Mask Bloc / Clean Air / Direct Aid!

I’m hoping to join a local Mask Bloc such as are listed on MaskBlock.org for respirator mask and air filter distribution, fit-testing, public health resources, as well as clean air safe/accessible arts and culture event organizing and planning a la Clean Air Club of Chicago

I’ve spent the last 5 years learning about airborne disease transmission and SARS2 pathology as public health has been dismantled. I intend to stay healthy and able. I’m keen to help others catch up with clean air. I’m often seen sporting a bright pink, floral Flo Mask indoors and among the people these days. I still need to do actual measured fit-tests!

Mask Bloc Los Angeles and other direct aid / mutual aid organizations in that area have been essential during the fires as the city and county government has entirely given up on PPE, planned to leave incarcerated children locked up to die inside active wildfire zones, and arrested people whose homes don’t exist anymore for camping, etc.

Social / Civic Society Invite Plz!

Keep me posted on meetups and opportunities for life drawing and plein air painting events, gardening, cooking, house music shows, human rights and labor solidarity, education, food and shelter, conservation projects, constituent actions, and good times!

Media Selections

Recently Enjoyed or Memorable Artwork

Reading Now

Recent Novels Read

Recent or Memorable Articles Read

Recent or Memorable Podcasts Listened

  • Science Quickly: Do Mitochondria Talk to Each Other? A New Look at the Cell’s Powerhouse, Youtube, audio
  • In Defense of Plants Podcast: Ep. 525 – Lessons from Ancient Grasslands, audio
  • Bad Faith: Episode 476 – The Forgotten History of Jewish Anti-Zionism (w/ Zachary Foster), Youtube, audio
  • The Andrew Price Podcast: #1: Habits of Effective Artists (Revisited), Youtube, audio
  • Drop Site News: The Real Toll of the War in Gaza: A Conversation With Two Doctors, Dropsite, Youtube, audio
  • Bad Faith: Episode 432 – The Third Party That Won the White House (w/ Matt Karp), Youtube
  • Palestine Deep Dive: Re-reading Ghassan Kanafani in the Struggle Against Genocide | Hazem jamjoum, Youtube, audio
  • Death Panel: LA Burns but We Keep Us Safe (Part One) (01/16/25), audio
  • Death Panel: LA Burns but We Keep Us Safe (Part Two) (01/23/25), audio
  • TrueAnon: Episode 419: Afghan Dope, Youtube, audio
  • UNAPOLOGETIC: Episode 20 – 100-year history of US meddling, coups and wars in the Middle East | Roy Casagranda, Youtube, audio
  • Farming Today, BBC Radio 4, BBC, RSS audio feed
  • In Defense of Plants Podcast: Ep. 455 – The Many Mysteries of Seed Dormancy, audio
  • Pod Damn America: The Airborne Toxic Event w/ Julia Doubleday, audio
    “Writer and former Bernie staffer Julia Doubleday joins Jake to talk about how the Democrats all gave each other COVID at the DNC.”
    Accessible, reasonably short primer on science of SARS-CoV-2 / Covid viral transmission and practical mitigation thereof, as well as a history of public failures and political malfeasance to act and communicate accordingly.
  • Palestine Deep Dive: Exposed: How Western Media Can Be Prosecuted for Its Role In Gaza Genocide | Craig Mokhiber, Youtube, audio

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