When you are learning a new thing progress can be very uneven. With Blender I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable with the basics and now as I’m trying to keep raising my game and improve my work there are quite a lot of separate things I need to learn. This has left me with a bunch of unfinished pieces all of which are out of my reach to finish. Some of this is technical - I’ve learned enough to be bothered by things that a couple of weeks ago would have been “good enough” but now need fixing. Some of this is new things to learn - I’m lazy and things I could model I’d rather have generated by scripts and some of it is a new thing for me - a lack of visual art skills to complete a picture. I can half see it in my mind but I can’t quite articulate it with my fingers. It will come. But it’s frustrating not to be able to make it work just yet.
But I guess - that’s why people have sketchbooks! To explore and work on ideas to develop them until you can realise them! So here are a couple of bits. Neither is a complete work but both are helping me explore an aesthetic I’m trying to evolve. The first came from a tweet - the author had mistyped “pride moth” instead of Pride Month. The author had drawn/made a moth in response to this. I’ve been meaning to try out Ian Huberts moths technique so was the start. Meantime I’m trying to work on a whole bunch of separate things:
I’ve had an idea since the start of the first lockdown - a music drone project (probably an album but it might be a thing I can do live too). There is a mood in the heat of summer: yellow fields, church bells and empty villages. Deep drones, haunting solo violin. I’d read a book on the plague and also a few years ago the book Harvest by Jim Crace. Somewhere in all of that there is a shape I’m trying to realise - and the imagery in these two things is definitely thinking towards that
Like a lot of people working at the moment - the whole ‘new weird’ thing appeals to me. I like all the obvious things : hookland, wicker man, Aickman, M John Harrison, MR James you know the kind of thing. But I’m also I guess trying to find my own take on it. I like ‘disturbing’ and ‘bleak’ rather than out right horror. I don’t really want to look to the past too much. I’ll know when I find it!
Another project I’m working on is more “urban” - I’ll say less about this one because it’s basically a set of mental images - but the building in the vertical picture is working towards this. The music for this project is more beat oriented and follows on from the piece from 4 years a go