October 20, 2020

I’ve been doing more and more art in Grafx2.

It’s one of those positive things to do despite any frustrations in life.

Any time doing art is time well spent. I don’t care what anyone says on that front, since if they say its a waste of time, then they probably don’t have any useful talent either.

What I’ve always like about art is that I can easily see the progression, as well as the risks I took. I definitely hit a block mid-year this year where I didn’t really do much art or music. I did some more self-analysis recently, and realized that I still had fun with it, even if the quality of said art was getting good or bad.

I would love to do some demo scene type art, but realize that I still need to keep building the fundamentals. I’ve been playing around with the ideas of proportions from the Loomis book. However, his eye for perspective is almost too freakishly good to the point where you either quit, or at least try to imitate it.

Perspective is definitely a weakness of mine, even with the reference “Perspective Made Easy” book I readily have available to me.

I can think YEARS back in time when I still thought it was such a weird concept anyway. It sort of almost ruins the creation process a bit, but as you get older, you realize that it’s really important in order to scale things up appropriately.

I’ve been writing more songs for another album for a band I’m going to call JeeveSobs, which is more or less just another midwest emo band.

However, this time, I don’t want to suffer from poor audio mixing quality, and I really really REALLY want to make sure it sounds good this time around. Though you can tell I became more aware of how a mix should be over the years through my music, I really never gave the thought to just hand that sort of thing to someone else instead.

I’ve only trusted maybe a handful of people who even know the vibe of the kind of music I make, but even then, its still hard to find anyone who won’t charge a lot just to mix a few songs, so we’ll see if I actually get the album mixed by anyone in particular.

I don’t think I have a gift for mixing, and I think that’s the best thing you CAN admit in order to improve. I’ll have to think of the best options around this but I’m glad to say this as I critique my own work alot.

I even sat back and thought about this website, and though I am happy with the progress, I could easily just turn it into a demo scene art page or something and even be happier.

I have learned a lot in terms of what “scope creep” is, and to just keep your ideas to a bare minimum.

I’m at a point of my life where if I don’t see progress on something within like 2 weeks or so, I easily lose interest. I just don’t want another repeat of that “ExpressOrLocalApp” project where I spent several months on a project to ultimately not really see the effort being actually used. Let’s all take a laugh at how I made an MTA data app that is basically now useless. It still is kinda funny.

But yeah, in all seriousness, that’s why I stick to small web apps these days.

Keep on working at it! ~ Sam