12
votes
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 write fiction. I've self-identified as an uncreative person my whole life, and am trying to buck that trend. I've been an enthusiastic reader forever, and it is unsurprisingly much harder to get a scene out of my head and onto paper in a way that seems compelling than it is to read it. So I keep noodling at it in my downtime, thinking about story bits and trying to write down cool ideas. It'll probably never turn into anything serious, but just trying to write is already pushing my boundaries.
One of the best pieces of advice that I got for writing is to "just write." Turn off the inner editor, don't try for perfection, and just get stuff on paper. Whatever you write isn't permanent and can be changed and improved upon. The trick is to get it out on paper in the first place. For a beginner, getting a work completed is a major achievement in and of itself.
The other thing is that your first few works will probably be among your worst. I actively cringe at the stuff that I wrote 20 years ago because it's so bad compared to what I'm capable of now. However, that tells me that I've grown as a writer because I can look back and critique my own stuff and call it objectively terrible. It also means that I couldn't get to where I am now without having to go through a "bad writer" phase in the first place. You improve by writing, critiquing your own writing, and if you're brave enough, have other critique it, too.
Thank you. I'm definitely keeping my expectations low and just trying to get it out. I've been bad at painting, at pottery, at woodworking. I can handle knowing that my initial efforts are going to be bad. I will try to focus on just getting anything out onto the page rather than stalling on some ideal of perfection.
You might have already seen this, but at your stage it is really, really important to fully internalize and accept this quote of Ira Glass:
It is all over the internet, search for it and you will find dozens of pages talking about it. It resonates because it is really true. It has been for me. After years of struggling with this exact issue I can now write what I want to write and not be disappointed by myself. It was worth it.
Thank you, I really appreciate it. Everyone in this thread has just been wonderful.
Sounds cool. Do you have a particular genre of story you are interested in writing?
I tend to like stories that catch at the imagination, and for me those are often worlds hidden beneath our own, with people and technological choices unlike the ones that happened to be real. Speculative fiction, broadly.
There's a few different ideas bouncing around. A "dungeon core" story set in the modern day world, a coming of age novel set in a world with layers of ancient civilizations with wildly differing technologies (a la Caves of Qud or Invisible Sun), a story set in an alternate Hawaii where the entire island chain was enveloped the ruins of an ancient civilization and as the inhabitants flee down into the depths to avoid imperial aggression, they find uncanny tools to help them take back their land.
So I have story seeds I like, and can map out basically how I want the story to go. That's all well and good for running a TTRPG, but just the basic craft of telling the story in a way that feels right is the work in progress. I've heard that ideas are cheap and writing is hard, and it's so true.
Buddy, you can do it! I started the same way ten+ years ago. It's a journey. It'll take time. Your imagination is important, but also you need to be sure to read a lot. Focus on the structure, the pacing, how the story unfolds. Don't be afraid to experiment, to write lousy stories. The key is to keep trying, keeping putting down words. Look at some of the good writing instruction out there, almost anything from James Scott Bell is great for motivation and craft. Welcome to a fun and challenging hobby!
I'm still trying to learn how to paint* with soft pastels in a looser, more painterly style. I followed a tutorial for this peony and I'm quite happy with it, but I'm having trouble bringing that sketched, broken edged technique into my other paintings.
Like, this gosling I drew from a reference image turned out cute, but I feel like I slipped back into my comfort zone of replication instead of the more impressionistic style I'm trying to learn. I tried to correct that by adding some color and making the grass a bit more interesting. Going, forward I'm going to try alternating guided tutorials with independent practice to see of that helps.
I've begrudgingly hopped back onto instagram to see what others are doing with soft pastels and hoo boy, it's overwhelming. There's some genuinely awesome work on there but the app just buries it in garbage. I'm trying to convince the algorithm to show me work from actual people, but it may be a lost cause.
*Sidenote - "paint" is apparently the proper verb according to actual pastel artists, but it feels weird to say I'm painting with a dry, chalk-like medium. I guess I've always equated paint with wet
Beautiful colors and expressive strokes! <3
I made a water flask out of a coconut shell, a simple idea with a surprisingly long history for me.
I originally came up with the idea, ("bottle gourd but use a coconut instead") in late 2013/early 2014, and came back to it every few years to attempt it again and fail. The problem is I wanted to use a single unbroken coconut shell, which means somehow getting all the flesh out of the interior through the single tiny eye hole. Naturally, any tool small enough to fit through the hole and then reach every inside surface is too puny to shift the tough coconut meat, so I looked for ways to soften, liquify, or crumble the flesh instead. I've tried letting it dry out, I've tried gentle heat, I've tried not-so-gentle heat, I've tried household acids and household bases, I once tried leaving it outside for flies to eat (aborted immediately due to smell), I of course stuck some pebbles in there and gave it a good shake. My research into the parts of the world where coconuts grow didn't turn up any evidence of intact coconuts being used traditionally to store liquid - everyone seemed to cut it in half to remove the meat and sometimes would reattach them, now no longer waterproof.
A week ago, having long exhausted what I can get from search engines, I decided to try asking an AI. It said many world cultures make drinking vessels like this and they accomplish it by repeatedly freezing and thawing until the meat detatches from the shell. I replied asking which cultures, which caused the AI to confess it had "overstated" the case and had no concrete examples whatsoever, except for one which I'll explain later. But I didn't recall ever giving freezing a go so I grabbed the first/only coconut I saw in the supermarket, and stumbled into the solution. This entire time I had been buying the ripe, brown, de-husked coconuts with the hairy shells open to the air. What I actually needed was to go earlier in the life cycle, the fresh green coconuts they sell for the coconut water. The kind that come with a straw and far too much packaging. For the first time I was working with a coconut with only a thin layer of soft flesh that could be scraped off with a puny little steel wire tool. I did a few freeze/thaw cycles, some scraping, finished off with some pebbles&shake and after 12 years(!) of intermittent trying I had a clean, meatless shell to use.
I waterproofed the whole thing with molten beeswax inside and out, which was easy because coconut shell absorbs oils and waxes like a sponge. Finally added a rubber cork and some rope netting for grip and voilá! It holds water perfectly, the only 'taste' it imparts is the beeswax which is mild, and most importantly the vibes are immaculate. The shell is still a shade of beige patchily turning brown with time, I assume that'll continue until it's a typical coconut colour.
PS: the one historical example the AI could find was called a "bugbear flask", european sailors in the pacific in the 17/1800s would take green coconuts on voyages for entertainment, to carve into these decorative gunpowder flasks while they were at sea (and they definitely weren't freezing them to get the flesh out). I'm yet to find anyone in history who used whole coconuts as a flask to carry water.
I love this story and your tenacity!
The vibes are, indeed, immaculate. What a fun idea!
Been meaning to do tons of kill-a-watt measurements of stuff I own and post it to my (or a) site. I love the idea of a site that gives people ideas of how much real world power a product uses (compared to what's on the label, or in some cases, not disclosed even). I am just planning to do my own stuff. At least make some data and a page about it for fun.
I could see a crowd-sourced site for this info being a neat idea too but that's not something I want to build or manage myself. (Another similar idea I have is for a site where people post the results of speedtests for internet from hotels and other public-ish wifi)
Also been meaning to add a page that lists all my tea and teaware and I keep procrastinating instead
Been considering doing a few simple videos of disassembling certain electronic products and noting any changes/mods/fixes i make or have made to them.
Lots of ideas swirling around, none of which I have been able to actually get done yet
You aren't secretly alec watson from technology connections are you?
Hahaha, nope. But I am a big fan of Technology Connections and I think I am on the same wavelength in a lot of ways.
Just started painting. No idea what I am doing, so acrylics and medium just creating a mess with brushes and palette knives. I always find an excuse not to do it, so it’s important to just do SOMETHING. Do it, finish it, do another.
Just signed up for Ableton’s “rent to buy” academic version for Ableton Live. Honestly, that’s the way to do it. Monthly rental price and after 12 months, it’s yours outright. Went from dodgy copies to paying because it’s a good deal.
I've been practicing my illustration and blogging skills for the last couple weeks. In particular I challenge myself to create some new tabletop RPG content every Monday based on a random wikipedia article and then put a drawing up alongside it. The random wikipedia articles have been a lot of fun to see weird stuff and create an initial seed idea! My latest one from earlier this week: https://stackofgoats.studio/blog/random-inspiration-21/.
I also started up another weekly blog series trying to put down a bunch of sentence or two long worldbuilding bits around a theme. I've always been inspired by the "try to think of six impossible things before breakfast quote" by Lewis Carol. Here's my set of random worldbuilding ideas around bathing: https://stackofgoats.studio/blog/worldbuilding-scraps-3/