art diaries #3 - oh my god i forgot to add a title i was wondering why this looked weirdly empty

or: The journaling bug got to me.

May 05, 2026

Hi, I’m Aengus, and welcome or welcome back to Art Diaries, the newsletter where I yap about art except not this week because I haven’t really made any! No weekly breakdown this week, but I’ll still have my Media Corner section, since I have stuff to talk about there.

First of all, this newsletter is brought to you buy the copious amounts of tea I’ve drank from my Moomins Arabia mug! You might remember last week I told you to maybe put a pin in the fact I hate paying shipping, and I told you that because my sister was recently in Kraków, where it turns out there’s a Moomins store. Obviously, I had to ask her to bring me back a mug, and she did! She brought me back the Moomintroll one (because she got herself Snufkin lmao) but between you and me, I think I actually prefer this design. It’s smaller than my usual ones, but it’s a really nice quality, and it brings me so much joy just looking at him. I got the mug Saturday night (like, midnight), and as of Tuesday morning I have drank six cups of tea out of it. I smile every damn time, too.

Alright, with inevitable further ado later down the line, heres what I’ve been up to!

Blender Stuff (Again)

Yeah so I haven’t really touched my sketchbook, like at all, or done much drawing. I dunno, sometimes that happens. I still try to flex the ol creative muscle though, and I think I’m really cracking the code for translating my own painting style into Blender. The key to all this is colour. I pick all my colours to an obsessive degree. I stay away from blending modes in digital art (as a manner of preference), and I usually work in mixed media just to get the right level of layering. I like putting colours in weird places, and that extreme level of control to push things into unrealistic territories is what I think gives my art a certain something. You might recall the very yellow tinted doughnut? Rejoyce, for the egg is not as yellow!

The tricks at play here are normal map painting, some minor texture painting and my Super Secret Shader Setup, which I will show you. For those unaware, Normal Maps are basically guides that tell the program what direction something is facing, and that helps calculate light fall. If you imagine a cube, each face is going a different direction, so they’re all coloured something differently. Of course, most objects are round, so as a result, Object Normal Maps tend to be gradients. If we break up the smoothness of that gradient, we break up the smoothness of how shadows fall. We can use brushstrokes to do this, and by painting them in manually from the point of view of the camera, it gives a 3D scene a look of being a hand painted 2D illustration, but with lighting flexibility. Of course, this didn’t come out of my own noggin, I learned from Cody Gindy, so please watch his video since it makes infinitely more sense than anything I’m saying here.

The method is not 100% flexible in the sense that, by painting from the camera view, a whole chunk of the model is unpainted, but thats easily fixable by… you know, painting it. Here’s a progression of the egg, you can see just how important this step actually is.

Egg scene without normal map painting and with rudimentary normal map painting

There isn’t a strict step by step formula to follow in order to achieve this effect, its just trial and error and editing all sorts of things till you’re happy, but that’s the advantage of relying on normal painting to give a painted effect. Texture painting small bits and pieces can help add further colour variation, as well as actual stylised “highlights” in fun shapes. Pick areas that you know will stay in shade for scenes like this.

Another thing that helps is the shader setup. You can see that I use the Paint System plugin for normal maps, UCUPaint for texture painting, and the bulk of the shader setup comes from TheSicklyWizard. It was initially for a cartoon stylised shader, it replaces a colour ramp with RGB curves, then separates and combines the HSV channels to give back light colour compatibility (another important ingredient in adding unique colour variations), since you can add cool blue bouncelights. I mix this with a Principled BSDF (with various settings adjusted on a case by case basis, such as subsurface scattering being bumped up to “whatever looks cool). The reason I do this is because without that shader, raytracing wont work, and since you HAVE to use EEVEE with this shader, you kinda want the raytracing. This may or may not be an inefficient method, I neither know nor care.

You don't need me to tell you the difference.

Anyway, the RGB curve method was probably meant to be used in steps, but it allows you to adjust the amount of RGB values in different parts of the image, meaning I get much tighter shadow control, and since its tied to the material, I get it per object. Woohoo!!! In retrospect, I’m not 100% sure how I did what I did, but I think it was just a lot of stubbornness and adjustment. My final important wisdom for this method is to set up your big things quick, like camera angle and main light source/shadow because you’ll be working in relation to them for the majority of the process. Pick your angle, make a window, and no matter where the sun is in the sky, it’ll still shine through that spot. Anyway, I’m glad I got so many words out about this one piece, because thats all I’ve done art wise!

I’ve Tried Something Adjacent to Journaling

I don’t know what counts as journaling. I don’t know what doesn’t count as journaling. I seem to have ended up with the evil cousin of a commonplace book. It was a bit impulsive, but I’ve always sort of wanted to try journaling. Anyway, I’m being vague. What I’ve gone and done is bought a notebook, and in that notebook I write thoughts of mine as I have them. I date the pages, try to timestamp the thoughts, and do my best to add context. I have a list of times I’ve used the Moomin mug, I have a list of my favourite Irish phrases, I might add some sudoku layouts in there for funsies. And while I don’t know what to call this, I am having a lot of fun, and I think you should consider it too! A bullshit book, if you will!

This book is a continuation of my “do the thing” attitude. I believe that when you want to start a new hobby or whatever, within reason, just start. If you want to learn to crochet, go to the store and get a hook and yarn, and go from there. That’s what I did, it’s been years since. I didn’t do excessive research into journaling or buy a super fancy one, I just got a book and put stuff in there that I liked. Whether or not it counts for a journal I don’t know, but I am now actually going back and learning about this cool hobby. Also I bought stationery. I’ve wanted to get Japanese stationery for a WHILE so this was inevitable, I will very much write about it here when it arrives. :]

Media Corner

I watched The Shawshank Redemption! Finally! I’m one of those people who has a letterboxd account, a long watchlist, but rarely watches movie except for rewatching nostalgia stuff. And also I rate movies highly because my analytical abilities are a work in progress and I truly believe “fun” is an important factor in a movies quality. I went into Shawshank really, really unaware (the ideal way to consume media, in my opinion) so that means I sort of thought “Ok, prison movie about a guy in prison. This is going to be really depressing, I think.” Instead it isn’t, rather it fits into category of movie where its a bunch of Things happening over the course of many years, think Bicentennial Man. It probably shows that I don’t watch any movies. Anyway, I’m not sure if there’s a method to ‘spoiler’ things in Substack but without letting on too much, it was a very fabulous watch, especially if you’re reading a newsletter about art in an age where ‘hope’ is hard to find.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Severance lately, and really need to rewatch it. I actually have the S2 vinyl, and it’s my favourite vinyl in my collection. Awesome soundtrack, obviously (shame you cant get S1 anymore, The Four Tempers is a REALLY good track), but the bulk of it is paper goodies. I cannot explain why they are so clever because it would both count as massive spoilers and also make absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone who hasn’t seen the show. Even the vinyl itself has etchings from the show on it, tiny little ones that you have to look for. I mean come on. Whoever designed it needs a raise. Go watch the show. Do not look ANYTHING up, the less you know the more immersive it is. Not to pull the “if you like x you’ll love y” comparison, but this series is especially worth watching if you’re a fan of The Stanley Parable, though they’re distinctly different. Plus, you can follow up your Severance watch with some Ted Lasso.

Finally for the media corner, I’ve been really into Red Dead Redemption 2 lately. Shoutout to Natalie who got it for me for my birthday, picking this game up again around now, after having not played an Assassin’s Creed game in a hot minute, has meant I’ve enjoyed it. Its so thorough I can’t get over it. Theres an in depth hair growth and cutting mechanic. You can play dress-up with your cowboy. You can ride around a beautiful landscape on horseback. You can go hunting if you want. I’m not that much of an open-world kind of guy, but comparing it to the only other one I’m really familiar with, AC Odyssey, while I was enjoying Odyssey, theres something less overwhelming and more fulfilling about RDR2.