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What creative projects are you working on? (August 2019 edition)
it's creative thread time, gamers. here you can share/provide updates on some of the projects that you're working on. they can be of any kind--digital, physical, work related, passion project, whatever. pretty straightforward, i think.
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I've just finished 3d printing the last piece of what will be a small statue of Reinhardt from Overwatch. Next is sanding and painting, which I'm still learning how to do well.
3d printing has been a great hobby so far, I find sanding and painting while listen to podcasts to be very Zen. Hope to eventually do some more elaborate prop recreations.
Started on a photo album I'm planning to give to my parents for Christmas. Well, I'm planning to print it as a book via Blurb, but it's a photo album, just not the scrapbook variety. They, like most people these days, love to look through old photo albums but since the analog days ended, they rarely print anything anymore, so old pictures sit on a hard drive or in the cloud somewhere and nobody ever looks at them.
I'm rarely this early getting started with Christmas presents (more like early December), but it's something I've been planning to do for a while and suddenly I just got the inspiration to sit down and do it. It's gonna take some time to put together anyway, and this way I'm in no big rush.
I just recently finished my first animation ("The Music"), which is something I'm feeling good about. It sure doesn't look pretty and is very obviously my first shot at animation, but it gets to the point and I'm more concerned with being able to tell a story at all than I am being a good animator, though hopefully I'll move in that direction along the way. I also completed an even shorter and simpler animation as part of an inside joke with my friends, and I'm just feeling good about being able to do it at all. It wasn't long ago that I resigned myself to not being able to do any visual art at all.
Right now I'm in between projects, I want to teach myself a bit about sculpting before I start on another animation. Hopefully I'll also be able to put together models which don't horribly stretch when I move them around. I enjoy how deep the well of tools are for 3d animation. I can always focus on learning something technical, so I don't run into the wall of staring at a blank project wondering what I do. It's been a great help with getting me to do something when I am very much prone to do nothing.
The next "big" project is still up in the air. I've been considering something more aggressively musical, like a video to accompany Barnyard by The Beach Boys, but I'd also like to embrace the quiet and dreamy nature of my first one and develop it to tackle some other things that weigh on me. I'm using this as a kind of art therapy, so I sorta see value in quickly making another thing instead of fixating on improvement.
Interesting story! At first I wasn't sure about the repetition, but I think
it's a neat study in how inflection changes meaning. I like the colors and
the models too, even though they're blocky -- the fish hook was a fun
surprise!
I started journaling. I've been seeing some amazing travel journal inspiration and it made me want to restrengthen my creative side.
I started by interstitial journaling. Just writing out my plan for the day and adding in blurbs when I complete tasks, but then I bought some travel art supplies. I got some nice pens, a water color brush pen, and I put some water colors in an altoid tin.
Besides that, I've been working on a screenplay in my off time. I've started a million of these things and never finish. I've accepted that it's just a hobby and an outlet to get ideas out of my head even if they never see the light of day in a meaningful way.
At the beginning of June, my friend and I picked up Casio F91W watches and NATO straps for them. We then disassembled the watches, filled them with mineral oil, and swapped out the original straps for the new ones. The goal was to take advantage of the incompressibility of liquids to make the watches survive deeper submersion in water, so this has kinda been an ongoing project of "is it working?" and fixing the things that pop up.
So far, I've been really impressed with how the watch has done, as I've taken it in the ocean several times and did a bit of light free diving down to 15-20ft deep, and my watch survived quite well. The main issue I've experience so far has been some pretty distracting scratching of the center of the acrylic watch face by sand when I was at the beach. I tried the DIY internet solution of scrubbing it with toothpaste, which sorta worked, and I'm now moving on to the internet's recommended actual solution of buying some plastic watch crystal cleaning solution.
The other project I'm working on is more or less skinning the top of my new space gray MacBook Pro with 3M vinyl in as close a color to the original as I can get. This is inspired by the post from Graham Stevens that I posted in ~tech last night. I want to protect the aluminum of the MacBook from damage/sticker residue, preserve resale value, and have the nostalgia option of being able to preserve all of my stickers if/when I get a new laptop.
So far, I've found some 3M matte dark gray vinyl on Amazon that looks like it should work pretty well, and I'm going to order that sometime today. Here's hoping it's more or less the right shade of gray the first time around...
I've just been making some Super Mario Maker 2 courses lately. I love the game and some of the communities around it. I've always wanted to make some of my own games, and making stuff in Mario Maker is definitely helping exercise my creative skills.
Also I'm really fascinated by the concept of the World Map Builder. I might play with it or make my own thing like it.
I need to get started on my contribution to Tales from the Fediverse, Volume 2, for which I'm going to illustrate a poem of mine somehow.
I've also been thinking of an IF story for IFComp, but I haven't started on it yet.
I'm also just now beginning month 2 of my Moon photos project. It's been rough this past week. I haven't felt very "creative."
Still working on comic. Work took a big chunk of time and energy this month, but I'm commiting a block of time each week to work with my brother to get out of arc one before the end of the year.
worked on some nifty little logos for a thing: behold peak performance of graphic design. i also have other stuff but that will probably get its own post later on.
I...um......acquired a traffic cone, so sometime in the near future I might try to connect some PVC pipe to it, then hook up a brass mouthpiece to it and have a DIY noisemaker/alpine horn. Think of something like this, but much more modernist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw-_vJvAGlk
I rearrange old songs and record them by myself on a 4-track taperecorder. And then I put them away and never play them...