A little visual art

I've been plugging along pretty steadily on all of my projects this month. Yesterday I did this little digital painting of Ester Dome for a social media graphic I committed myself to making for a solstice show we're doing up there in June. It made me miss real paint, but I am slowly getting the hang of the digital stuff. It's pretty wicked versatile. Every time I just doodle around I find some new way to use a brush, or a filter. This one has a posterize filter and an edge detection filter layered in there somewhere between the overpainting and the underpainting, and a random noise filter on top at 10% opacity. All just tinkering the textures.

All of the guitar is tracked, and we met to do the vocals this weekend, but decided to take a week and get the mix a little tighter before we try tracking over it, so I'm learning how to use Reaper right now. I have very little experience with DAWs. I had a cracked version of Ableton for a while, and that was fun while it lasted, but for the most part I just use simple ol' Audacity when I need to do some sonic fiddling. The end is in sight for having the album ready though. Now we are speeding ahead through all of the auxiliary art for it. We storyboarded and wrote a song for the kickstarter video on Sunday.

I took a break from 3D modeling the lighthouse for the chameleon girl project a few weeks ago after getting one panel of the lamp down solid. I have a pretty good idea of how to turn it into a hexagon using an empty and an array modifier, but it's a little more complicated than the tutorials I've explored. There's some gear work I want to do in there too, and the minutiae of it is a lot more exciting when I know what I don't know, you know? I wanted to mess around in blender on some more frivolous doodles and get a feel for the process of modeling and coloring and moving-a-thing, so I've been working on this skateboarding mouth creature. I've had a loose sense of what I want it to do and how I want it to look since I started, but it's taken some neat turns along the way. Right now I'm doing a tedious and terrible dance with weight painting and rigging. My laptop does not love it.

3D art is neat because it's just ripe with hilarious and cursed images in the intermediary steps as a thing slips into and out of the uncanny valley on its way to becoming whole. It's pretty easy to get lost in, in a good way. The plan right now is to have a small animation of Mouth Guy featured in our kickstarter video, so I'll be focusing in on that project pretty intensely for the next couple of weeks.