Sometimes you just need a break <em>Having done nearly 350 lectures of a React course in the last month or so, I decided I needed a break from coding school this week…</em>
As much as I enjoy coding (yes I’m aware I’m a total nerd, I’m fine with it) there really is only so much of it a person can do without starting to go a little gaga. I’m not going to lie some parts of the React course I’m studying have felt like wading through molasses and it’s needed all my willpower and regular reminders to myself about why I’m doing all this work to keep going. But keep going I have…
To reward myself for reaching the half way point by completing 342 lectures I decided to take a break from the course for a week and do something more creative. This coincided nicely with Graham having a day of leave on Tuesday so we sat down together with a nice cup of tea (and a plate of biscuits!) and spent an afternoon going through my Vale of Araluen model making a big list of ‘to-dos’ and ideas.
It’s proven to be much harder to work on this project together than we thought it would be. We thought our plan of me working through the modelling of The Vale during the day and then discussing my efforts and the questions that arose from said efforts in the evenings when Graham got home from work would work nicely. But the reality has been that by the time he gets home at around 9pm that we’re both too tired to have those chats. Apparently we’re now old, as we definitely did this sort of thing with creative projects in our 20’s and 30’s. But now we’re both into our 40’s our batteries don’t seem to hold as much charge anymore.
As a result I have created a lot of simple ‘place holder’ models of elements such as the front door, the windows, trees etc to help me scheme out the world and while this has been very helpful with figuring out the layout, it has also created a huge backlog of questions that are accompanied with a sense of overwhelm about what needs doing. There are so many details that I wanted to discuss and choices to make.
The List
So getting an afternoon together that we could chat everything through when we were both awake enough to do so and had with no time pressures was amazing! After many hours of discussions we came up with a list of things for me to work through for the next couple of months with a view to trying to get the first video done early next year. This list is as follows;
The front door of the castle - redesign and build
The windows - rework the glass house windows and cut them all into the walls
Grass - create a series of brushstroke textures
Trees - create a brushstroke texture
Mountains - replace the cones with more organic shapes
When Graham headed back to the office on Wednesday morning I set to work on item number 1;
The Front Door rework
I love Georgian architecture, it is so refined and beautiful and I really like how it references ancient classical architecture from Greece and Rome. While undoubtedly pastiches they are tasteful and timeless (unlike a lot of modern versions!). I knew I wanted castle Araluen to have a small portico front entrance inspired by Georgian town houses so I spent several hours on Wednesday looking at images of beautiful buildings in London and Bath (buildings I have seen in real life too!) for inspiration. Below are a some of my references.
Then I set to work scribbling. I came up with about four design variations, one with a triangular portico roof, one with a flat portico roof and then a couple of different upper level window designs. I wanted to try and get our phoenix logo into the centre of a big central window inspired by some windows I’ve seen on a couple of renovation programmes on TV. One was from a mansion in Ireland that had a huge arched window on the staircase (which I sadly can’t find a picture of but it was very much like the one you can see on the front of Ranger’s House.) and another was in a chapel at Culdees Castle in Scotland, that the owners removed the religious imagery from and replaced it with two peacocks.
The Sketch
Here’s a reminder of what the front of castle Araluen currently looks like with my simple front door model. My original idea was for the front door windows to look like flames. So it would look like the phoenix is rising out of them. But it just doesn’t quite work, I think it’s because there are too many different styles. I also think that the phoenix emblem looks ‘too corporate’ as it currently is.
Before : current model
This is the design I’ve chosen - luckily Graham agrees with all my choices! You can see I’ve also done some work on the glass house windows too. I didn’t like either of the ones I have done simple models of, the rectangular ones are too boring and the more gothic ones are too ‘churchy’ and don’t really work. So I decided to stop trying to reinvent the wheel and instead just use traditional orangery style arched windows which look way nicer.
I hope you like the new design, let me know in the comments what you think and what you would do differently.
After(ish) : just a sketch of what I’m aiming at with new Georgian inspired front door and phoenix window. Plus reworked orangery windows.
What’s Next
I’ve got the basic model for the pillars, the door and the door handle built in blender now, but I’ll wait to show you those until I’ve completed the entire portico and front entrance.
It’s been really nice to get back to my creative work this week, I’ve really enjoyed it. So I think I’m going to try and split my week up a bit more and do half coding school and half 3D modelling. Yes it will take me longer to get through the course but now I don’t have to worry about my computer overheating in my very hot studio as it some how seems to now be nearly winter I really want to get back to building The Vale. In all honesty I think it’s been good to take a break from building The Vale for the last couple of months, I’d got a bit frustrated with myself at not finishing anything and feeling like I was never going to, but now I’m really excited about it again.
So I guess the moral of this blog is that taking breaks from big projects and endeavours is a good thing… it can be very easy to get bogged down in things and lose the joy we started them with.
Thank you for reading,
