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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
I've been trying to sketch cars recently. I always struggle with perspective so I've just been tracing photos I've taken of cars but I'm slowly getting better.
Have you ever heard of draw a box? It's a internet art tutorial from somewhat hardcore drafting artists that provide a lot of guides and real mechanical practice for this stuff.
Ooh, I don't think I've heard of that. I'll definitely look into that, thanks!
My biggest project these days is writing and recording music, in particular microtonal music. I have found that using quarter-tones allows me to explore all kinds of new harmonic ideas without completely abandoning the traditional sense of tonality most Western music has.
Music is especially challenging for me, though, because I suffer from ME/CFS which makes even minor physical exertion extremely taxing. As a result, the most recent album I recorded (link below) was created in sporadic 15-minute increments of work, whether this be recording electric piano or composing/arranging parts in my DAW (both of which I could do while recumbent). I think it actually turned out pretty well, despite this limitation.
https://notmusiclabel.bandcamp.com/album/a-north-facing-window
Luckily, I have a few friends who are helping me now, so my next album will have drums, bass guitar, vocals, flute - all things I don't have the energy to physically perform myself. This will allow me to take things in more a rock/funk direction, whereas my previous album was more electronic.
This is a great album! I love how the keys are so crunchy, and it highlights the funkiness I love about microtonality, and the way you also fill in around it is amazing. I think it was in "Depleting at the Speed of Time," there's this part where you hit a chord, it's warbling, and the bass just jumps in on that warble that gave me goosebumps.
Thanks so much! You're actually right on the money with the crunchiness synergizing with the microtones; that was a very intentional design choice. The 'crunch' is really just putting the keys through an overdriven amp. The overdrive clips the peaks and troughs of the signal, which for mathematical reasons ends up increasing the presence of higher harmonics in the sound. This is critical because the human ear uses harmonics to determine whether two notes are 'in tune', and a lot of microtonal intervals are only in tune with respect to higher harmonics (as it happens, with quarter tones the 11th harmonic shows up a lot).
The drawing zoomies have been eluding me ever since I quit caffeine but always on the lookout for something that strikes a spark again.
Anyone out there with the opposite problem (too many exciting ideas, not enough time)?
I do! I have a webcomic that I've been chipping at since I was a teen. I have, for the last year and a half, picked up GMing and I'm having a blast drawing maps, NPC art, and tokens. My players have requested I draw so many moments from the campaign (mostly jokingly but I do actually want to).
Working full time and all the chores leave me with so little energy after work I can't even turn on my computer (like tonight).
GMing is great. That was going to be my jam this year until I ran out of juice on that too lol
Highly recommend doing MS-paint-level scrawling doodles of these and posting them anyway. It's my favourite type of DND content to consume because you just get a goofy out of context snapshot instead of the pages of backstory and context that always appears when I try to explain my best campaign moments to others.
Those are amazing! Yeah, I should totally MS paint some of my campaign moments.
My players never really described how their characters looked like beyond what's on their character sheets so I think I'm just going pull some executive decisions on it lol
Currently collecting ideas for a new desk for my office. I've been suffering with some Office Depot specials since college and want to build something nicer. In the analysis paralysis mode at the moment with too many ideas, but I'm trying to distill them down into something feasible.
For me? New music!
I was a full time producer about 10 years ago, burned out a bit, got a “real job” but now I’m making Drum & Bass music again.
If anybody is into Metalheadz,Ram Records, Phibes or other “throwback” style jungle music have a listen and share
https://hyperfollow.com/HCKRS/Daytona
I love it!
May I know which softwares do you use to make music ?
I use Ableton as my DAW, and use a combo of Xfer Serum, Synapse Dune and the bundled Operator as my main synths.
I also do a lot of sample chopping, and that’s just in Simpler and on Audio tracks.
I've been chipping away at writing a tabletop RPG for the past couple years. I still have lots to do before I can play test it, but I'm just doing this as a casual hobby - no pressure to release or anything. I've developed video games before, (mostly in college) but designing a TTRPG has a different set of challenges. It definitely keeps my creative juices flowing!
Oh that sounds cool! Mind sharing sharing some details about it?
Sure! Right now, my system has some similarities to Fate, Mouse Guard RPG, and Lady Blackbird. The theme/format is fantasy, like Dungeons & Dragons, where player characters go on quests that a game master prepares ahead of time.
The GM starts a "scene" (just like a movie or TV show) that gives the PCs something to do. The players interact with the scene, and the GM fleshes out details as needed. Sometimes this will be exploring a town to search for a lead on an investigation, other times it will be combat with fun fantasy critters or a Lord of the Rings style travel montage.
When a PC takes an action in the scene, they usually have to make a check (rolling dice) to see if the character succeeds at whatever they're trying to do. My system uses multiple six-sided dice to determine the result of a check. You roll a certain amount of d6s based on one of your character stats, then you're able to tweak your roll further based on how good your character is at whatever you're trying to do. You could re-roll dice, add more d6s, trigger abilities, etc. Then you count the number of successes (rolling a 4, 5, or 6 on a d6 is 1 success) and the GM will tell you what happens next based on how well your character did.
Some other goals I'm striving for are to have it be player-driven, meaning that the players are the ones taking actions and rolling dice so that the GM can focus on setting up scenes and presenting challenges with easy to use templates. Player characters can turn into a tiny dice engine from spending resources and triggering abilities when they roll specific dice and such. Trying not to make it too complex, but I like a little bit of game in my role playing!
I started writing it just for fun, but it's been interesting to see how I've updated my RPG as my tastes in other RPGs changes too. Really trying to focus on making it as streamlined as possible, as I've found that I prefer complexity to present itself gradually as you get familiar with a game rather than having it all be frontloaded. Easy to learn, hard to master, etc. It's a good challenge!
That sounds like a super difficult balance to strike with a TTRPG, but it would be awesome to see! My friends and I have kinda done that with D&D/Pathfinder, as I'm sure many groups have, just by being lenient with newcomers and not explaining everything until it's necessary so they can get immersed in the world and their character, but having a game built around that concept would be awesome. Good luck!
I figure I’m about three to six months away from finishing the second draft of a novel. Been working on it off and on for about five years. I learned so much about writing fiction during the first draft that when I went back to re-read it, I realized that it had potential but was not all that great. I’m sure I’ll do a third draft when this is done, but it won’t be a almost-complete rewrite like the second draft was.
There is no great writing, only great rewriting.
I started this a few months ago to get the hang of Deflemask, which was for a time the definitive chiptune tracker, but @akir brought furnace to my attention, so I started finishing it in there.
I wanted to duplicate the fabulous aryx.s3m to a Commodore 64 sound chip, since with that PWM that comes and goes throughout, it's absolutely perfect for the format.
I started in OpenMPT to "pull the notes," sort of, so I just used the raw note input for my value, not the heard pitch, but I believe they match up? The real effort went into getting all the patterns more or less identical. The C64 version is less dynamic because, as you'll notice, when I use the following pattern, you can see the in the first column 0f changes to 08. The C64's sound chip, like many of the era, treats this as a global value. I found the constraints fun to learn as well. You'll also notice the timing seems to hitch and drag, and that's definitely not anything I did.
Anyway, here's ARYX.FUR, as exported from Furnace. I still want to try to get it chip-accurate, which means I need to work with getting the proper format exported and running it either in an accurate player, or in an emulator. Deflemask's .sid export had issues, possibly due to how I'm handling various effects.
I’m making an arcade machine!
That includes making the wood structure, painting it, configuring the Recalbox OS on a raspberry pi to emulate a lot of different consoles and arcade machines, installing the sound system etc…
Perhaps I will post the result on tildes once it’s finished!
I'm working on an album. I used to make music all the time, but went through a decade-long dry spell of experimentation and abandonment. I wrote very serious music for a long time before then, so now I'm going the opposite direction with some absurdism. It's cathartic, is giving me drive & direction to put what I learned through experimentation to use, and is a fuckin blast.
I've been getting real into funk the last couple of years, so there's a lot of influence there, and I used to make rap so there's a good bit of that too, but I want to explore a variety of genres and styles on the album.
I released my first song on Spotify (Travelers in the Checkout Line) last month, and have a few more in the works. This one's just about finished, but I still gotta tinker.
I'm working on making two open source games -- Turbo Fat which is a puzzle game similar to Tetris but with new pieces and new rules, and Frog Finder which is a low-stress puzzle game where every level has its own rules to figure out
Overall my goal isn't to make money, but I just really love programming and it's a fun creative outlet while keeping my skills sharp~
I've been trying to re-learn my old custom tap-dance choreography for The Book of Mormon's Turn It Off (Not exactly this example, but my own adaptation) on days where I still have the energy to dance after work. Old muscle memory is doing a lot of work, but of course some more precise movements still need improvement. Also, I really need to improve my cardio as the performance goes from singing at the top of my lungs, to a dance repertoire, to going back to singing afterward. Any other tap-dancers on Tildes? I'd love to chat.
Additionally, last summer I wrote a play for my amateur theater group. I did so in my last summer break before getting a job, so I had pretty much full-time to churn it out in the span of a mere couple of months. What also helped, though, is that I was massively, passionately inspired to write that particular play, making me easily the most productive I have ever been creatively in my whole life. The play turned out to be a great success.
What I have been working on lately though is finding ideas for a new play to write. My biggest problem though is that a similar level of passionate inspiration hasn't sparked within me ever since, on any creative project I have worked on. I was wondering if anybody on Tildes recognizes what I am talking about, and could maybe share tips to find that spark again, or perhaps how to write a play without it.