Flame-Breasted Fruit Dove & Guadalupe Junco
For days 2 and 3 of Avian August!
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Blaugust Archeology
I was going to write the short version of this as another Mastodon reply to a thread that Belghast tagged me in a little while back but I realised, hey, it’s a free blog post for day 3. Let’s crank this out and be in bed before 2AM 😉
So I did the traditional walk down memory lane for the start of the month and it seems like we landed on “Blaugust” spontaneously during our group’s first blogging festival.
The original name, if it had any, was “blogfest”, which was already corrupted by the time I made my first post of the event.
While other participants also called it “Blagofest” on day 1, UnwiseOwl, the instigator of the challenge took a much classier approach to it, dubbing us the “Augustinians”. Yes, this ties into his occasional papal blog content. Despite this seeming to be a natural term for those who take on the Blaugust challenge, I haven’t seen it widely used. Maybe we can lay claim to a little bit of original etymology there 😉
In the replies to Owl’s post, you’ll see I made a comment about the “Baubloggers”. Perhaps this was the seed that planted the next corruption into “Blaugust”, which was quickly coined on a Day 2 blog post.
By Day 8, UnwiseOwl caves to “Blagofest”, but “Blaugust” is yet to take hold. It takes another week until he concedes to “blAugust“, but it’s almost as if he still disavows it, calling it “Ale’s blAugust adventure”.
Come August 31st and September 1st, “blAugust” appears to be the victorious moniker. UnwiseOwl is the first gold star member of our group of Blaugustines – having successfully posted every day of the month. One of the blogs died an honourable death, having been set to self-delete if no new fiction was published each day. Another blog appears to have been lost to the mists of time.
Come 2012, there’s no question of what we’ll call our now-annual blogging festival. It’s canonised as Blaugust.
Despite my earlier claims on Mastodon, I found during research for this post that we certainly can’t hold any claim to the name (there are blogs still alive from 2010 and perhaps earlier that called the “Blog Every Day in August” challenge “Blaugust” rather than “BEDA”). It’s possible that we were unaware of these earlier efforts because Twitter didn’t have a great text search, and the first hashtags don’t start appearing until later years.
That said, I still believe that it was because of Twitter that we did quickly discover Belghast’s Blaugust when it began, and it’s been inspiring to see that the stewardship he’s provided has made the event one with staying power.
Alright, it’s definitely past 2am. Day 3, out!
Light Cycles
Aaaa I wrote a piece about Light Cycles last night but the media just would not upload and then I somehow managed to lose my draft post. So here’s just a single photo from the event.
Meringues
Took my first crack at making meringues (or at least, the first try in my adult life). The rest are currently sitting in the oven (recipe says to let them sit in the oven as it cools) but I couldn’t resist grabbing one to try now.
That blaugust thing, huh?
Once again posting just to keep things alive for a little while. Not sure if I’ll be posting regularly during the month (I’m already drafting “August 1st”‘s post after midnight).
I think there are things I could/should be documenting, so we’ll see what happens for the rest of the month…
Checkpoint
As many people have probably found, the pacing of this year’s been all out of wack. And so we’ve hit August, a time where I’m usually feeling at least some… kind of restlessness… and it’s taken nearly half the month for me to even feel like I have anything worth saying.
I did want to make some kind of post this month. The only other time I’ve missed Blaugust entirely I ended up regretting it. Seeing the archives completely lacking in a waypost for 2017 felt wrong, and it’s something I really wanted to avoid repeating. I know I’ve used this this turn of phrase before, and I expect it will return in every August to come – in fact I hope it does – so that I can guilt myself into making some kind of contribution.
Loose Threads
When I opened the blog to start making this stream-of-consciousness mind-dump, I found a left-over from last year. Did I double post this? Did it miss publication? It seems to be the post for 21st August that…. just didn’t make it out into the wild. I guess I’ll hit publish on it once this post is up.
Motivation
I haven’t been very disciplined about my art of late. I haven’t done any crafting in the last year really either. There were a couple of high-activity moments – I participated in Inktober last year and mostly got a piece done each day of the month. It was good to just draw for the sake of drawing, but perhaps it fostered too much of a disposable attitude towards art – the same things that made it so liberating – “this piece doesn’t matter beyond today” perhaps made it harder to return to long-term projects.
Thus the projects that I’ve had that would take multiple sessions to bring to life haven’t gotten off the ground. And my desire to post things here on my blog is almost entirely gone – after all, the ease of posting something to Twitter for instant gratification leaves this blog rather disadvantaged.
Besides that I’ve also been… I guess disenfranchised. I’ve known for a long time that I don’t really have a unique perspective or special story to tell and… it’s hard to create when those doubts linger. Plus so many other clever people are just out there making mindblowing art. It’s not that I’m indulging my competitive side it’s just… I don’t feel the need to compete on this playing field at all. I’ve been thinking of dropping out of Artists Alley if I’m accepted for the January AVCon, because I just don’t know if I need to do it. I have a day job and I don’t intend to turn my art side-hustle into anything bigger, so tabling is purely an exercise to feed my ego.
Holding Up the Mirror
The alternative path that I should possibly put more thought into is that… my creative mind doesn’t have enough space for nourishment at the moment. Maybe Inktober was successful because of the ratio of brainstorming/concept development to actual art creation was really high. I could spend time in advance thinking of a prompt and then do the actual art in a single session.
It’s harder to consider larger pieces at the moment because if they can’t be done in a single session, then other factors come into play. Each time I return to a piece I’d have to find my rhythm with it again. Plus I’d have to intersperse the completion of the piece with the day job – and an outstanding piece of art can be quite the distraction to work with.
Is it possible to cut down on other demands on my time in order to focus on art? One would think that these recent periods of isolation would have been a great field to explore this in, and my failure to do produce any art in this time perhaps proves that it isn’t the solution. But on reflection I just failed to put any focus on art – I’ve been setting speedrunning goals, twiddling with coding side projects, I taught the cat new tricks, I invented some new recipes, I practiced my accordion, I played quite a few rounds of Terraforming Mars.
My father, a retiree, said a couple nights ago that he too thinks up too many projects and can’t make enough time for them. Oh woe, I thought that was only a problem for me presently because I work during the week! To think it will forever be like that. I guess I may need to stop indulging my wandering mind and examine if I truly want to be doing more art, and set goals accordingly.
Still, I can’t help but envy John – who is presently working 2.5 days a week – and wonder what I could achieve if I had the same amount of free time, if not more.
Looking Into the Mirror
I think at this point in life, I’m no longer struggling to carve out my identity. I just… am who I am. So I don’t feel a need to prove myself in art (or coding, or getting a top spot on the Untitled Goose Game speedrun leaderboard…). And while it’s comfortable to not need to pursue those things I’ve failed to find alternative sources of motivation.
Maybe I’m less upset about the lack of art specifically, insomuch as my actual concern is mourning this lack of motivation. What used to drive me to post during Blaugust?
Next Steps
After all that rambling I think I’ve finally thought of a couple things that I ought to put up here. I made a dang fine yuzu crème brûlée recipe that should probably be properly documented (Twitter threading didn’t treat it well). Maybe I should scan and touch up some of my Inktober pieces. Maybe some other old art ought to be documented here too. Maybe some of my coding escapades could afford some introspective blog posts. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll find it in me to make some new art.
Thanks for reading, hopefully I’ll see you again before the end of the month.
Tetris Heart
I played in the Classic Tetris Australia Online tournament today, but despite that I decided to colour the pieces according to guidelines.
This isn’t the greatest execution but I’ll probably return to the concept another time.
[Also I did paint and attempt to post this on Saturday, I only noticed the “update failed” sitting in this tab when I opened my laptop on Monday morning. So still behind on a Friday post but not suuuuper behind……]
Blocks and lines
Planned to have a lot more of this done tonight but solving the placement of the tetrominoes proved to take much longer than I thought it would (the outline I initially drew up didn’t have the correct area so fixing things took a reasonable amount of time.)
Next time I’d probably mock this up digitally before launching into drawing it!
Blueprint
A little while before Blaugust started, I found myself with the itch to pick up art projects. I guess I saw Blaugust on the horizon and wanted to bulk up on content.
On Twitter, I saw a bunch of animation students needing people to work on content for their animations. That was seriously tempting, then I remembered the pressure of being responsible for people’s uni assignments (something I had some experience with when doing laser cutting jobs a few years ago) and I cooled on it a bit.
After that, I saw someone in the PAX Australia Enforcer group asking for someone to draw up some maps and logos for their DnD game. That sounded pretty nifty, and would flex some skills that are somewhat weak for me.
They sent over a hand-drawn map which included descriptions of a building with a number of floors. I initially decided I’d try modelling it in 3D. Here’s a close-up of the staircase, which was a fun little puzzle to try to solve.
The 3D floorplan really wasn’t working and it tripped me up a bit. So I decided to go back to basics – draft out the floorplan in Illustrator and then draw in details in Photoshop. I improvised somewhat with the rooms as the initial sketches just described a run down interior. You’ll recognise the floorboards from an earlier post!
Eventually, working in Photoshop and making adjustments to the actual layout of the building got quite cumbersome, especially when the interior walls needed to be changed to be wooden panels rather than stone. Maintaining both the untextured Illustrator version and the textured Photoshop one became a pain, because my Photoshop layers would no longer match up to my vector outlines.
I moved as much as I could back into Illustrator. For the walls, I used a number of appearance modifiers to create the lines. A single path therefore displayed its texture and a dark outline without me needing to draw in any fills. This made readjusting stuff much easier!
Here’s the completed floor. We left these rooms bare as the players will be furnishing them.
Since this is now a vector artwork I lost the crinkled paper effects that I could achieve by using a displacement map + multiply layer in Photoshop, but there’s nothing stopping me from just doing that as an extra step at the end of the process.
I learned a lot while drafting this floor. However I’ve been quite slow in turnaround time. The requester has been very patient with me!
I’ve since asked for their permission to post the work on the blog so if we do future floors I will be able to utilise them as my daily blog posts. That way I won’t be trying to do a daily sketch AND make revisions in the same evening.