Hey Newgrounds, I hope you had a great new years!

It's been a while since I shared what I was up to. Even though I was fortunate to have plenty of work and a job easy to do remotely, 2020 was undoubtedly a challenging year trying to stay productive and positive amongst all the uncertainty and chaos.

I started the year working on a really cool job for Studio Yotta back in January. I painted about 50 backgrounds for the anime fight sequence in episode 4 of the Animaiacs reboot which came out in November. At this time Australia was on fire and some days bushfire smoke blew over Melbourne creating an eerie thick fog and hazardous air quality. Little did we know things were about to get much crazier.

When the pandemic really started picking up in March, I was renting a coworking desk at a local animation studio, Studio Showoff and doing my own freelance. Things went from 0 to 100 so quick that on a Wednesday, my friend Colin who was also renting a desk took his gear home which seemed overcautious at the time. But the next Monday was my last day I would work in the studio.

On April 1st, Smiling Friends came out! I worked on it back in 2019 as a background artist for Yotta.

During the first lockdown I worked on some fun things: A music video for Studio Showoff for the song 'Learn to Fly' by Surfaces and Elton John, another Showoff music vid for the song 'Boxes' by Gavin James and some Flashgitz toons.

Australia as a whole did a very good job suppressing the virus. Restrictions were starting to ease, there was talk of the borders between states opening up again and I finally could catch up with some friends one time. Here in Melbourne that didn't last long. The virus jumped from quarantined international arrivals into the wider community and spread quite far. While life was back to almost normal for my family back in Adelaide we needed even stricter lockdowns. Mandatory face-masks at all times outside your home, no visitors, only essential shops like supermarkets, can't travel further than 5km, 8pm curfew, the whole nine yards. It felt like my world had shrunk and I only ever left my apartment to go to the supermarket or a walk around the park. During lockdown 2 I did some work for a studio called Mighty Nice and I worked as a background lead on Mystery Skulls Animated: The Future.

HBO Backstories – Watchmen was also released. It’s a short I worked on back in late 2019 as a background lead at Studio Showoff.

Now our hard work from the lock-downs has paid off. With very minimal covid transmission in Adelaide or Melbourne the last few months I've been able to travel interstate and I had a very normal Christmas and caught up with a lot of friends. It’s a very nice reset after 2020.

I recently updated my portfolio BackgroundArt.net with some of these recent projects if you want to check out more of my art from them.

I'm working on something really cool and very secret right now that I've called Project Codename "Fusion" and a few more exciting things are pencilled in for the future too. Happy new year and yay for 2020 being over! Have a wonderful 2021.