Cucumber-flavoured potato chips

My last two updates arrived on consecutive Saturdays which is a habit I intended to keep up — I failed on the next two opportunities, once because I was driving my family from London to Yorkshire last weekend (and I didn’t have the foresight to plan an update in advance) and twice because yesterday I thought about it but then had a nap and forgot afterwards. So here’s a quick Sunday update instead.

Forgive the repetition but my mailing list has been growing fast, so there’s a good chance some readers won’t know: I’m making a game! If you’re new, have a look through my post archive for a bit more info and some concept art. I’m working with my friend Alex and we’ve been working on a prototype for a while. We have to switch focus for a bit to make sure we can support ourselves (we live in London, I have two kids, it’s expensive) which means taking on short-term work contracts (we both freelance in tech, Alex is a software engineer and I’m a designer and engineer too). It likely means a bit less progress on the game for a while and then ideally some more heads-down time in the next break between contracts. I’ve had a creative awakening over the past handful of months and am committed to bringing as many of my ideas to life as possible no matter how long it takes (which includes a game, but also lots of other stuff) — I fantasise about being able to focus full-time on all of that, but it is what it is. I don’t want this section to get much longer so let’s chat in the replies if you have thoughts on this topic!

I was on a break with family this past week, but the week before I was trying to put together some material for a quick video I have in mind to explain how I animate water (and other stuff). I use a magic tool called EbSynth that applies my style across a bunch of animation frames using one single frame that I’ve styled myself as a reference — I think it’s pretty interesting (and I hate that I have to say this nowadays but it doesn’t use AI, and neither do I in any work). In lieu of having the video ready, here’s an old thread I put together that explains it. If you’d be interested in a more in-depth video, please let me know — and check out some of the artwork I was putting together to help explain things below.

The first artwork I made for the video is below, which I subsequently felt didn’t actually contain enough water to really show the technique off (and I also overall didn’t feel like it was the best example generally compared to other work). This is a GIF, so you’ll probably need to view this post on Substack (rather than email) to see the animated version (and it also might take a while to load).

The next artwork I made is below (also a GIF), which I think is a much better example in terms of the amount of water on show and also much cleaner in terms of the movement of the reflections and so on, but I really want any examples I use to sell video courses to be some of my best work (so that it has more chance of catching people’s eyes and being shared more widely on Twitter, which impacts sales) and I wasn’t feeling that way about this one. I did experiment with a new technique here which gives the water more of a feeling of horizontal movement, which felt like a small breakthrough and I’m excited to explore this technique further.

The final (hopefully) image I was working on last week and will aim to pick up this coming one is the one below, which is currently in progress. It might not be clear from this WIP image below yet but it’s a rabbit on a boat dunking its head in the water to have a chat with some fish. I’m aiming for it to have the same proportion of water as the example above, but with more story, detail and general intrigue.

It’s Father’s Day today and I have twin 21 month old daughters, so I got two cards (their handwriting has improved a LOT and it’s strangely similar to my wife’s) and among other things I received a bag of cucumber-flavoured potato chips (sourced from a nearby Asian grocery store). I’m British so I actually call them crisps, but there are two reasons I keep writing this exact phrase. The first reason is I think most of my audience online is from the US, hence chips. My second reason is that if I said ‘cucumber chips/crisps’ you might think they’re dried cucumber or something, but no these are a cucumber-flavoured, potato-based snack which I find hard to make sense of.

They’re pretty good, they taste a bit sweet and remind me of seaweed-flavoured snacks. Anyway that’s all for now, thank you and see you next time!