What creative projects have you been working on?

Iv been feeling very frustrated recently and want to do something creative but iv never been very creative. Well iv never been great at drawing or painting or making anything. So iv started writing. Kinda just exploring putting thoughts into words. Its kinda on and off but recently iv been writing more than usual. So I want to keep this ball rolling. Thinking about writing some poetry.

I was recently dragged, kicking and screaming, into Warhammer 40k by a coworker of mine. Started out with Kill Team, and now I have a whole 2000 pt Astra Militarum army. My god, the amount of time Ive spent painting for the past two weeks. I never knew my neck could hurt so much from sitting hunched over a table working on painting these tiny pieces for hours.

At the end of February I put together my first solo art show. In March, I decided that deadlines & project-based work are good for me, so I spent the month making two zines. One poetry zine, and another wordless comic.

Now that those two projects are done, I’m trying to catch my footing. I will attend a zine festival at the end of the month, so I need to go back and print & bind more of them. Which is an activity I don’t particularly enjoy.

However, I did play around with 2D animation these past few days, and I enjoy doing it; so once I’m done with printing zines, I will make a 30s long animated short.

This isn't really a project but I'm trying to learn how to draw. I think a lot of people can relate to this feeling of consuming much more media than they create. It's been a real drag on me lately, so this year I resolved to pick up a new creative hobby. I've bounced around a couple, but the one that I've managed to get to stick is drawing. I started back in February and managed to draw for 30 days straight for at least 10 minutes a day. Often, I found myself going way above the 10 minute goal.

It's been super fun! I decided at first to just skip learning fundamentals and to just focus on, you know, enjoying the activity. There's not point in doing something for fun if I optimize the fun out of it. I was inspired by this short YouTube video to just do it. To draw stuff that I think is fun and just get around to making it a habit. If the habit does stick around and I do enjoy it, then I can focus on improvement by doing fundamentals and studies.

I've slowed down the last couple of weeks. I'm finding myself getting distracted by work, YouTube, video games, etc. It's been harder to sit down to focus on drawing. I'm starting to get back into the habit of at least drawing something everyday.

Been working on some shelving for my entrance for my handbag and totes etc. So I went and cut my old skateboard in half (it's been collecting dust for 10 years so who am I kidding, I'm not going skating ever again lol). Griptape was easy to get off but the #$@! glue underneath was crazy. This crap was the strongest glue I have ever seen or felt, like the first time I tried to get it off, I held my hand on it for control and it seemed for a few seconds that it would not let my hand go, to the point that I was genuinely scared my skin was about to come off. Anyway, trial and error - sandpaper didn't work as the glue just.. stopped it in its tracks, the grit got stuck to the glue. I took to scraping it off with a sort of knife but it was really quite painful. Managed to finally get it off with benzene. Despite scratches from when I tried to scrape it off, it looks quite beautiful. The wood is truly gorgeous on the top part! Just need to find a good spot to put them up and then that's it. I'll post pictures when I get around to it.

I finished repainting some American GIs for the tabletop wargame, Bolt Action. I had painted them many years ago when I was still pretty new at painting and even then, I did a very slapdash job and haven't really been happy with them. So much so that I took them to a tournament last year and was just generally a little disappointed and embarrassed to have them on the table, especially after running a British 8th Army I had painted much more recently that I am very proud of.

At any rate, I just painted directly over what I had done, as well as changed the period and geography of their uniforms and I'm so much happier with them now. I still have some other random stuff to repaint, but it's not much and I'm eager to get started on them once I finish up a different project I just started on.

Every now and then I dip back into this mmo project gorgon.

I'm working on trying to get an xp parser working to track xp earned per hour. There are so many things to progress I want to get a sense of how to min max the process. And I get to work on some programming skills.

I have heavily been getting into sampling music over the last year or so. Started messing with a Korg Volca and a Model: Samples a few years ago, that has spiraled into quite a collection of hardware samplers by this point. I'm just obsessed with making things on my Elektron Octatrack. I've been getting into a bit of a groove by sampling breakbeats from older hardcore, punk, emo, and post rock stuff - stuff like Fugazi, mewithoutYou, Tortoise, Stereolab, etc. Then, on top of those drum parts, I layer in samples from film scores for melody/harmony. Have gotten some great samples from the scores from Eternal Sunshine, Amelie, Grand Budapest Hotel. It's a ton of fun. If anyone on here is into working with samples, would love to hear about your sampling process!