Reflection #51 – April 22

Dear Journal,

The last two weeks again flew by fast! Most of the days were over quickly as well. I noticed how tired I’ve gotten in the morning, but given I have fairly enough sleep, I should consider a strategy to get me out of bed more easily. Up until now, I’ve placed my alarm clock on a shelf opposite to bed to force me out but – without a pressing matter to attend – I don’t feel the need to stay up. I just wish our lectures would start sooner…

Anyway, the month wasn’t very productive here on my social media, I’ve done a lot of things privately or out of my usual medium. This semester is sound- and film-based so sadly it’s making it quite uncommon to post anything here, also I’ve spent quite a lot of time writing that short story I’ve been working on over months now, well why not cover it a bit now that I know I’ll finish it: I’ve been plagued by my night-thoughts to finally continue the old stories that once breathed life into my artistic journey. So I returned to what I’d consider was once good in and I sat down to write my stuff. Doing this now is to get me back into form first and foremost, secondly to develop the characters I have to find more inspiration from my writing. The downside – and this, I had to find out first hand – was that it took considerable more time than originally expected.

I realized how the knowledge of storytelling, structure and character-development made it harder to keep track of the nuances of writing that I so enjoyed back in my teen-years. Also after 2020, I lost the practice, support and artistic integrity to continue writing. Hopefully, the little story will help me get back into the craftsmanship to prepare me for my more ambitious projects and little by little storytelling in the future.

Anyway, what’s the story about even? Together with eifle79 I wrote a very lengthy fantasy story that started out with just two characters. And this very lengthy story resulted in us creating much more: places, worlds and even more characters, two of which were the elite operative Zavi and the adventurous Technician / Computer genius Tobias, whose paths eventually crossed and – since the unspoken ending of things – evolved. In the back of my head, these two have been around in a semi-consentaneous partnership that had good and bad things happening in their lives. But since they could never really get along with another, it was bound to happen that their relationship broke apart and that’s where the story kicks in.

The story is written fairly far, only the third act is missing and I’ll have to re-read it a couple of times to refine the pacing and a few spots. It shouldn’t take more than two weeks but given my current track record of how well it went, I’m just happy if I can finish it in May.

But now, let’s finally talk about some artworks!

Spending much in March for donations for those in need, I had no money left to get me some games. One I immediately got on the 1st of April was Elden Ring, that I’ve barely been avoiding from media coverage and this Blaidd guy certainly didn’t escape my subconscious as I was sketching random wolf heads that eventually turned into an anthro, then a knight and this character. It was very fun to work this out, as I’m still developing this charcoal-esque style with minimal colouring and until now, this is the one piece I’m most satisfied with among all the previous ones I did with this method. While my means are fairly limited, as long as the source material fits this style, it should come out nicely. Sadly the game was too addicting and the rest of my days too short to have worked on more like this and I had to move on…

Something else I had been thinking about was to bring back my old char Jasper. I wanted to cover him at least once a year but sadly it didn’t work out in 2021, which I really regret, since it would’ve addressed Jasper’s loosing control of his life and letting others take the lead for better or for worse. This here was supposed to be set in a depressed mood of him laying weakly in bed, but none of my background concepts wanted to work out, so in my desperate attempts, I merged some of my paintings and tried to harmonize them in some way. And it worked… in the end. Colour-balancing was a chore sadly, and I spent around 2 weeks in total for this, which really didn’t have the need to take that long, but then again, I had some days when I skipped working on it… which can happen sometimes.

Anyway, I’ve returned into a somewhat more productive pattern at least when before and after Easter, I was liking gaming a little too much. I’m once again reserving it to the weekends and see that it works out better.

As for future projects, I checked and noticed that the Fruit Hat tradition is calling and I’ve been dragging a nice idea behind me for a couple of months that I was very eager to try out. Hehe, let’s see how quick i can work on it 😛

Aside from that, I better not make any predictions. I still wanted to do a new character design and do more animation practices. But that’s a broad resolution, no promises!

Those should be the last words from me this month, be back next time and bring some summer vibes along!

~Souvillaine