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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.
A friend of mine just had a Significant Birthday, so I wanted to make them something special.
I got some modelling clay and made it into a rough, wobbly, lumpy ring shape. Then I sculpted that shape a bit and refined it and refined it some more until I was happy, then I cast it in pure silver. Which I then polished and polished and polished and... polished some more. I have new polishing gear I wanted to try out, the finest "grit" is 0.1 microns which is "moderately small sized virus" kind of size.
I'm very happy with how it came out. Have not yet given it to the birthday person, but I think they're going to like it.
That's such a great piece! It looks wonderful, I love the flowy shape of it.
I've been working on writing a thing for most of the year. Finished draft 1 last Sunday at 128k words. Now I'm on the painful part: reading it and marking up with a red pen. Turns out there's actual structure to writing and you need to think through how things flow and build tension. Rather irksome.
Congratulations on finishing your first draft! That's a big accomplishment.
Although I don't really have any classic illustration skills (drawing by hand), I got an ESR Geo (recommended inexpensive Apple Pencil alternative) for my iPad Pro and have been using apps like Sketchbook, Fresco, etc. to doodle and draw and create. Mostly just for fun, to dabble with a side of graphics that I'm much less familiar with. Although I don't know that I'll have the time or energy to turn this into a highly-invested skill and get a lot better at it, for now it's been super enjoyable, and sometimes I'm surprised at what I can do (it's nowhere near "good", but far better than I ever expected my hands to accomplish). Watercolors and traditional things mimicked with digital pens are SUPER fun.
Since @gryfft shared the hypertext fiction from Snuggle Squiggle about a month ago, I gave the telescopic text tool to write some short fiction in that format.
Here's: I hated oranges (290 words)
I certainly appreciate that story a lot more after writing in this format because it's challenging to figure out how to write in this click-to-expand format and still keep it cohesive even at such a small word count. I started out with something similar to the example text on the website by Joe Davis, and it's an excellent creative writing exercise to think this way.
This is lovely!
There is something truly special to me about fiction that presents challenges and hidden depths like this. Like reading footnotes of footnotes, but transforming the shape of the text as its meaning emerges from the marble. The experience of reading these almost feels like writing, with the story appearing as the reader engages more deeply.
The format really lends itself to complicated feelings, and drilling down on a sense memory is a great choice. What begins grounded in sensory experience and buried in rote little self-deceptions unravels into an emotional gut punch as you keep pulling the threads.
Thank you for writing this!
Footnotes of footnotes is a great description! The structure of this format does lend itself to complicated emotions well, I tried exploring with other ideas in third-person but it worked the best with writing a character's thoughts. Thanks for reading!