4/5: profile art in blender

i HAVE been making art i swear, i participated partially in the open game art's game jam but i got busy and a little burnt out and wasn't able to finish (maybe i'll work on it again someday cuz i like the idea), but now that that's over i'm picking up work on the other game again. i doodled out a portrait style that i liked but then i thought about how much id need to draw and how long itd take and said fuck it we're making a posable model in blender. probably gonna paint the textures and all or at least most of the shadows so it still looks drawn and definitely gonna need some post work but that'll be WAY faster than drawing them all from scratch.

also aha adhd moment im getting the itch to work on music again aha im very excited. it's probably because i got my addy back

3/3: more characters!

so im making good progress on the game, at the point where i should think about making real levels. one of the first important characters for adrian's story is her mentor, melanie. not sure if mel will ever fight with adrian, maybe later, but she definitely needs a sprite. i made a base out of adrian's model to make making sprites a little quicker. then added clothes and wingies

mel's a fun character. she runs the panther rogue outpost that adrian's a part of, but she's not a panther mage herself. no one questions her being there because of the wings; random animal transformation is the way of the panther, after all. mel, however, is a prince mage -- just like her twin, the royal advisor for ingrid finis, the Weaver Queen. mel, like adrian, is initially from the Weaver, but unlike adrian, her leaving was much more her choice. mel and her twin, mireille, had a major falling out when they were young, mainly due to mireille's delusions of grandeur and grand plans to take over the world or something (or at least, that's how mel viewed it. she wanted nothing to do with that). mel was much more immediately rebellious, in contrast to mireille's calculated coldness. at some point, mel stole a pack of supplies and a small boat, sailing off to make a life anywhere but here. she didn't know she had a stowaway.

mel and mireille have been flaoting around in the story basically as long as ingrid and adrian have existed. i loved the idea of having two characters in very similar positions to the two mains but with a vastly different relationship. i still want mel to be a small barrier to adrian's journey back home, but as i've thought about it, i much prefer mel and adrian having a legitimately close relationship, even if mel is hiding the truth of her power. it's really just mireille who's weird.

ive finally settled on a design i like for now. cheers

2/19: yeah sure i'm making a game

okay so i know i keep hopping projects BUT i'm sick of not making a game out of adrian and ingrid's story and i think im sorta starting to understand coding. i'm using the godot engine; i've tried a few engines, and while i think i like gamemaker's in-house language more still, gdscript is easy to use and read + my heart belongs to open source + godot's nodes and components are really easy to understand.

so far, i've gotten movement and animations working! im trying not to follow too many tutorials, mostly so what i learn can actually stick, but i did need to follow something to build out a state machine. it's not something i could've come up with on my own, but i think i at least understand how it works, which is enough imo. This is what i'm using btw

the plan so far is to work out combat, movement, and transformation mechanics before actually building out levels or a story or anything. I need to keep it small if i actually want to finish anything.

sometimes i feel a little bad with how much i jump projects. i haven't finished anything besides the occasional illustration since my album last year, and i really wish it was easier to stick with just one thing until it was done and good. it's better to just be kind to myself, because ADHD and all, and i do enjoy learning and doing whatever sparks me, but idk. i've been frustrated with myself recently. i wish it was easier to be an artist in this hell world.

sorry for the negativity, here's what i got.

2/4: pixel renders!

hey i did it! and they look! good!

i completely remade the model and it honestly went way faster. we were stuck inside cuz of a bad snowstorm so i got to finish up the rig and animations and honestly? im super happy with it

1/25: sketchin

im slowly working on the music video but in the meantime i sketched some of my 8sorc girlies and finally got around to working out adrian's tiger form. not sure im happy with it but maybe once i take it into blender something will spark me

1/16: Building Toward a Music Video

yeah i'm in for a brutal couple of weeks. maybe months lmao

the main reason i'm learning blender is to make videos for my music. I made Aquarius in vroid a while ago (That's what i was using to make all their content beforehand) but to make a long story short i needed way more control over their look and rig if i wanted to make music vids, so i took on the pretty massive challenge of modeling them from scratch, rigging and shading the whole deal.

it's actually going really well! im comfortable in blender now, and am pleased to announce that their model and rig are now usable :) the next big big hurdle is gonna be making an actual animation with them. ive never. like. actually made a long animation before. but i feel confident as long as i approach it the right way and dont burn myself out on something too daunting.

i'm very proud of what ive done on this project so far. i've finished a basic storyboard to the song, and i'm working on assets in different blender files to test out ideas for how to elegantly lay all my ideas out. I really like the workflow ive got going, since i get to hop from thing to thing without getting too bogged down in details.

here's the storyboard:

even if i never do anything past this, i still have it, and that's more than anything i've maybe ever made. animation isn't really my normal wheelhouse, so i'm proud of whatever i can come up with. looking forward to updating yall

assets and a fun vid i made of their finished facial rig:

geo nodes can suck my dick send post

1/1: Secret Santa Present Finished

she's done

there are so many mistakes and blender crashed multiple times but im happy with it! i hate weight painting!!!!

12/24: Blender Pixel Art Work

Not sure if I'll ever actually make the game with the 8 Sorcerer Girls like I want to, but i did have the idea to try and expedite making pixel art animations using blender models. I'd been doing a lot of 3d modeling work recently so it's just another way to practice.

Yesterday I did more shading work and i started rigging it. weight painting is true hell.

12/21: Read some more

continuing the long tradition of adhd'ers getting passionate about shit only they care about, i recently started doing some personal research into depictions of sexuality in pop music, specifically focusing on the way men do it. In my experience, it's actually way harder to find examples of men in pop singing about what hot shit they are than with women, and when men are expressing sexual confidence, they tend to do it by identifying with female pop divas (gay men do this especially and theyre iconic for it)

anyway when I started this i was having trouble finding any sources discussing maleness in pop music like at all which only made me even more keen to do this research because. where are they. i love the feminist writings on empowerment those are great but maleness is such an interesting subject i think it's a shame how little is written on it ya know. my saving grace is this book i found called Pop Masuclinities by Kai Arne Hansen.

Hansen is a professor in the music department of a university out in scandinavia and his book is honestly a breath of fresh air. it's pretty dense and academic, so i don't necessarily recommend it for a casual reader, but as long as you're willing to give it time and a notes page it's not actually that hard to follow (necessary caveat being that i went to college for music so im used to reading stuff like his). he uses several artists' personae, both in their music and public profiles, to construct a basic thesis that male pop artists occupy a tricky space where their masculinity is constantly in question; they can do things that seemingly counter patriarchal expectations while reaffirming masculinity simultaneously. Think Harry Styles wearing that skirt: it was a cool, transgressive moment, but it's transgressive because it still has an undercurrent of "a BOY wearing GIRLS' clothes," when clothes maybe shouldn't be gendered at all. That's basically the whole book. it's pretty good

since it's dense and can get honestly a little heavy in places, i can only read about a chapter every few weeks. i'm flying out to my parents' for christmas, so i got the chance to read a bit more of it on the train. i'm on his chapter on the weeknd, and this is probably the first time i seriously part ways with his analysis. i think the points he makes are good ones, but i feel like he voices ideas of violence or drug use in a pretty surface level "murder is bad and traumatizes people" way. theres a few points i will be taking with me, though, like the idea that an abundance of murder and drugs in pop by men serves as a counter to pop as an extremely feminized, "inauthentic" genre (hansen really chafes against "inauthenticity" being used by critics to mean "feminine," and he's COMPLETELY correct it's amazing). like "look guys, im not a pussy! i fucking KILL people! i'm a REAL MAN!"

that idea comes up a couple times in the book and in pop more generally. it happened with Zayn, the first artist the book covers, who came out swinging after 1D broke up with Pillowtalk, just a full dark sex-fest because I guess he'd rather die than people think he was still an effeminate little boyband boy.

i'd love to seek out some more sources on where that fear comes from because i just can't shake the feeling that's what the core feeling is. i'm not a man so i can't really imagine a life constantly fearing that my masculinity could come into question. what would that even mean? i'm fully prepared for the answer to just be because misogyny is a bitch and so is patriarchy. thats what bell hooks seems to be implying (i picked up the will to change recently and if youre reading this go to your library website right now and put a copy on hold. trust me).