Painting, Writing, and Sleep Deprivation
This week’s blog post brought to you by insomnia! Gosh, I wish I was talking about the cookie company… Obviously, today’s blog is happening on a rather odd date, and there is a perfectly normal reason for it. I just happened to finish the chapter I was editing early. The way I handle editing my chapters is that I edit for one hour at a time, and with the schedule I have during weekdays, I get two hours in per day, which lets me finish a chapter every other day with fairly accurate consistency. Today, I finished my chapter in the first hour, which I must say went stunningly well as I took out almost five pages worth of text, which equated to about fifteen percent of its total size! Not a bad hit, but it probably needs to go lower.
REGARDLESS! We are here for a blogpost, and a blogpost we shall have! On the menu for today is the project I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. This was a new twitch art project meant to serve as a background to eliminate the black borders on games that don’t really fit the resolution of the website. I had a few ideas for this, but I ultimately took it as my chance to go ahead and work more on my landscape art, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out! With that being said, let’s just go ahead and unveil it!
So, here it is, something probably not exciting looking but was a MASSIVE effort for me. When I came into this, I knew I wanted to make something fitting the vibe I have going with this Fennec Aeronaut I’ve been using as my avatar, and the sky seemed like a perfect fit. At first, I wanted it to be more like a sunset and then… well, things kinda went sideways. I very, VERY quickly realized that I don’t have a good handle on drawing clouds, or even understanding their shape, which triggered a multi-day war with clouds, hence where the name came from for last week’s blogpost. Ultimately, I rolled back the sunset and focused on just making some BASIC CLOUDS, which was STILL an immense effort and had me taking pictures of clouds at every stupid turn. I felt beyond stupid, but at LEAST I achieved SOMETHING in the end. They aren’t perfect, but they definitely look like clouds. Though, they do look a bit out of focus, so… clearly I still have more work to do, but this is still immense progress for me!
Next up, the grass! I did ok with the grass, but it definitely could use a touch more work. I really wanted to capture the image of grass rolling in the wind. I tried a few experimentations, some of which were left in the image that probably shouldn’t have been left, but ultimately discovered that the best way to do rolling grass is to make long lines of lighter colors and then blur them back and forth in a sort of cross hash pattern. If I wasn’t sick of working on this piece, I would probably go back and add in some texturing to the colors to add in some variance to the grass, but, what I came up with is fine enough for me.
Rocks! This was my next hurdle. I am NOT good at rocks. Never have been. However, I did find a method for this and finally broke down a wall I didn’t realize that I had! I finally realized that hard lined rock faces are NOT the right strategy. Softening the edge makes them look a lot more realistic, and I also discovered the power of gradients! Now I just need to refine a little further and figure out how to add more shading in splotches to capture some lumpy unevenness, but, again, massive progress!
The last two things are the dandelions and the wind. For the dandelions, they were simple enough, though I don’t think I was perfect with them. The cottonball was easy but could use some shading, and the stems look alright, but a little too flat. However, I did discover that I can blend them with the grass using upward strokes from the blend tool, so that was a great breakthrough there! Finally, the wind. I drew three lines and then blurred the crap out of them the same way I did the grass, and that actually achieved a nice wind stream that I then filled with leaves and debris flecks. Honestly, I have little to complain about except the fact that I didn’t think to include cotton on the wind… That should have occurred to me earlier, but oh well!
So… that’s it! That’s the piece I’ve been bogged down with! With that out of the way though, I want to start focusing on the last of the twitch assets I want to make, a couple of interchangeable labels and a frame for a webcam image. I don’t think they’ll take tremendously long, though, I do want to experiment a little with some metal assets, so… It might take some time. My next major project however will one thousand percent be Atom, so keep an eye out for a feathered fowl in the near future!
Near Future
Speaking of near future, I just wanted to touch briefly on the next few weeks. With Wow’s next expansion launching, my schedule is about to go out the window for a brief bit, so expect the blog posts to… get a little lean. I’m still going to make time to write them, but it might be a little bit before I can make a new art piece or short story. After all, September is kinda… packed. Satisfactory, AOM retold, Wow’s first season, and my self-inflicted Ark Server are all going to gobble up my time, but my hope is that, with this art piece out of the way and the server stuff nearly done, that I can popout one last short story before the expansion launches! I am determined to get it done this weekend, so expect a short-short next week! After that… well, we’ll see!
Book Stuff
So, Sapphire Verdict stuff is, of course, still happening behind the scenes. I’m working through the last few chapters of the second book and should have it trimmed down a little within the next few weeks. If I had to guess, I’ve bumped close to 800,000 words down to maybe 650,000? Still WAY too high, but at least it’s something! Progress on this will continue into the next few weeks at which point I will shift to editing the third book down, which will take probably three or four months time depending.
But, that leads me into my next point. I’m still working on hunting for an agent, which I have a bad feeling is going to keep going for a while. Trying to market a 560,000 word book is… rough, and even if I say “I brought it down from 1.2million words” that doesn’t really mean anything to an agent or a publisher. That being said, I did find an agent recently that I am still REALLY excited about. I haven’t heard back from them yet, so, at least it hasn’t been rejected? I would kill to have a chance to talk with them for even a short five minutes, but I know I need to stop getting my hopes up at every turn. Suffice to say, I’m still working on it, and will be prioritizing a new round of query letters soon in order to keep the ball rolling, as much as it kills me to do it each time…
3d Models
I just wanted to include a segment on this real quick because I know the models got a little traction in certain places. For now, I have no near plans to make more ship models, but I do have ideas for the distant future. MY main goal right now is to start filling in faces on the universe page AND make a big piece for Sapphiria and Atom that I’ve had in my head for a while. I also want to experiment with a new art style that I think will be slightly quicker than my current one, which will allow me to put out some more landscape pieces to coincide with the map. All in all, don’t expect a model soon is what I’m trying to say, but you can expect more at some point! If I had to guess, next up on the menu will either be new frigates for both factions, or potentially their battlecruisers. Time will tell!
Closing
There’s not much else to report from this week. I will be live on twitch most of next week for the launch of the next wow expansion, so feel free to stop by and say hi! My social anxiety will only spike a little, I promise! Hopefully next week I can report success on a new short story, though I might get blocked by the lack of an art asset (It is NOT the short story that the yellow data capsule is a placeholder for. That one will be coming shortly before the release of the first book). With all that being said, I hope this blog was at least semi entertaining to someone, and I hope next week’s blog is an exciting cap before I disappear into my computer!
CHEERS!
The Flying Fennec