Urban Sketching in Sweden

It's been a while since I made an update here on my Journal page, but I have been busy! For whatever reason, Inktober 2025 really resonated with me, and what stuck with me is the idea that your artistic journey should always be in motion, even if it's only a little bit at a time; any progress at all is moving in the right direction. 

Robot Repair bay 2d to 3d

I am dusting off a few more of my old robot drawings, in this case a few from when I was using SketchbookPro on an iPad mini, and showing my digital art fairly frequently. I brought the image into Vizcom with a simple prompt and a color refernce to re-imagine the scene. Once I was happy with the 2d model, I tried a few version of 3d conversions and exported and then pulled the main robot into Blender. 

Robot repair pad by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

Adriana - 3d sculpt from Vizcom render

Recent work in Blender led me back to testing my ability to sculpt 3d objects through Blender, and this is still very much a work in progress, though every mistake teaches me a little more.

Adriana_sculpt_VC_MC by Matt Connors on Sketchfab

Sketches with reference to Claude Lorrain

My habit of drawing in a sketchbook is always somewhat improved after Inktober, though it always feels like I need a bit of a break in November after making nearly a drawing every day. The conscious effort to draw and complete on ideas is great practice, though I often find that looking at other artists afterwards helps me to relax a bit, and focus on other's approach to artistic challenges. I came across a book on Claude Lorrain, whome I have always appreciated as a painter, but often the individual paintings I don't really relate to. Claude Lorrain paintings But this book featured many drawings that I was unaware of, and the pen and wash handling is really extraordinary, inspiring some of my own drawings.

Silo to Vizcom: Reaktor

This scene had a bit of an odd start; I was reading a book about failed architecture projects, and came across images for a failed Crimean nuclear power facility back in the 1980s, that was abandoned in favor of Chernobyl by the Soviets. Their was a shot of a well, I am not even sure what it was for...but it got me thinking and then modeling.

I liked the way it was coming along, then I used Kaiber to animate.