6 September, 2024
I've always enjoyed making things and I think I've always been a creative person, although what kind of person doesn't think that about themselves? When I was a kid I used to enjoy sculpting a lot, building things out of modeling clay to use as accessories for my dolls and action figures and whatever, even making new limbs for them when one broke off! Those clay limbs were the best by the way, so customizable... I also used to enjoy drawing, and I even made my own comic at one point, printing out as many copies of it as I could on the copy machine at my dad's work. It was all stick figures, but it had a story! Kind of.
I spent a lot of my life surrounded by artists and creative people, too. I used to own a comic book store, so I met a lot of those types of people there. Also, my ex is an artist and so we went to a ton of art events, most of our mutual friends were working or at least hobby artists, etc etc. It has been great being surrounded by so much creativity, and by so many people who can see clearly that there's a lot of things more important than your "day job".
However, when trying to contribute something myself to this milieu, I always felt pretty lacking. Sure, I can write, although I know that may not be apparent by what I've been writing here! And that's fine and all, but I've never been a writer and also most of the art events I used to go to didn't exactly have a literary component. I tried drawing a bit at sketch events and such, and received encouraging remarks, but I never felt like it was a skill that was clicking for me. If I really ground out a lot of practice with drawing, maybe I could figure it out, but if I wasn't feeling it then convincing myself to put in that kind of time was simply impossible for me.
I mentioned before that I enjoyed sculpting when I was younger, and I still think that's probably my most enjoyable real world creative skill! But I'm not exactly getting daily sculpting practice either. I could come up with all kinds of excuses why I never went all-in on that, but in the end I simply didn't. BUT! I have found a way back in...
It turns out that 3D modeling is actually pretty similar to sculpting, once you figure out what all of the little tools do. There's even a sculpting mode in Blender, where you can add clay and scrape it away and pull and push and all of that good stuff. I don't know for sure if this is a long-term interest, but for right now it's really scratching that itch for doing something creative! It's especially neat that I can upload the results into Second Life and show my friends, put it on the marketplace for strangers to see, and even put them up for display in my cafe (yes, I recently put together a cafe in SL, come on by).
As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm using image-to-3D to generate the base models and textures, but as I get more practice and experience I spend more time shaping the models and painting the textures myself to match what my expectations are. What initially comes out of the sausage grinder is never perfect and needs a bit of massaging, and that's where I get my practice time in. So, in the end, I'm getting a little practice with drawing too while repainting those textures! I hope that this keeps being fun for me, because I'd like to continue improving and getting more experience with it.