MAKING WORK FOR MYSELF<em>I promise I’m not procrastinating this time!…</em>

Firstly an apology for not posting an update for a while, the past couple of months have featured some pretty stressful curveballs that have taken up a lot of emotional energy and time. It’s been a real ‘it never rains but it pours’ time and in all honesty it’s been pretty tough. But it has also been enlightening - to quote one of my favourite lyrics by one of my favourite artists ‘the cold never lasts my darling, it just teaches the heart how to burn’. (Raye’s incredible new album has really helped keep me from completely falling apart in recent weeks and has frequently had me in tears listening to it, if you haven’t listened to it yet please do your ears and soul a favour and listen to it). 

While I’ve tried hard to keep moving forward with ‘The Vale’ and also with growing the business side of Ayane Studios, I haven’t had the bandwidth to share my progress with you until now.

Acknowledging a milestone

I’ve basically finished all the landscape sculpting, there is the odd bit here and there that still needs tweaking but those bits are very much in the ‘finishing touches’ category. It was a much bigger task than I expected to get all the various areas to blend into their respective neighbours. (I literally had to move mountains, albeit digital ones).

There were definitely lessons learned about how to gradually build up a world during this process! The main one being to pay a bit more attention to the scale of gaps when I’m blocking things out to save myself headaches and work later in the process. The beady eyed amongst you might notice that the castle has moved rearwards relative to the loch banks, while not something I wanted to do, it was the neatest way to sculpt the landscape together.

Mapping Lawns

The terrace lawns now feature procedural grass and paths that use vector mapping, mapped normals and noise textures to create the colour gradients. All of which I most certainly didn’t work out how to do myself! Rather I found this amazing tutorial by trungduyng to help me create the look I wanted. As always I’ve modified and adapted it a fair bit, as I didn’t want to replicate the anime style exactly (which is the intent of the tutorial), yes I wanted a painterly effect but I wanted my lawns to be more ‘watercolour-y’. 

Echos of Monet

I’ve added a pier and a bridge, both of which are inspired by one of my favourite gardens; Monet’s garden at his Giverny home. I simply had to add some water lilies mainly because I love them, but also in homage to Monet and because I was really captivated by a video that Brooke Comier shared about her trip to Algonquin Park, Canada. The lakes there were absolutely full of water lilies in full bloom and it was so beautiful. It is definitely something I want to see with my own eyes one day (she also did a video about the gorgeous painting she did inspired by her trip which I also loved).

My lily pads need a bit of variation in their shading, which is on my epic to-do list. They are just a block colour at the moment and look a bit boring and ‘auto-generated’ which is a swear word in this studio.

The front steps needed a fair bit of re-engineering to make the position of the pier make sense - many configurations were tried and this is my favourite.

The planting around the bridge is a work in progress, I have only got as far as a weeping willow tree at the moment, but I have plans for this area.

Long & Winding road

There is now a proper driveway that runs all the way around the loch. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, I’ve tried several different ways of modelling it but couldn’t find the right technique. I finally figured out how to do it by using a nurbs curve with a profile swept along it so I could vary the width and height at various points in order to get it to fully blend into the bridge, work with the gate and the different levels. I didn’t know you could do this in Blender until very recently.

I built the stone driveway bridge a while back, inspired by a bridge at Chatsworth House (known to many as Darcy’s house in the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice) but it required a bit of modification to root it into the river banks properly. Which I did during the driveway construction.

The Forest is taking shape

The Visken Forest is looking more dense now - I keep getting a surprise when I turn this collection back on because I hide it most of the time to save my poor computer from melting. All the branch alphas seem to really stress my graphics card out (unsurprisingly really, there are a lot). Each time I make it visible again it’s like a magic ‘make a forest appear button’ and I realise I’ve done way more work than I thought! Which is nice. If only there was a ‘make a forest appear button’ IRL!

You might recognise the rock I’ve added by the loch side if you’re a subscriber to my newsletter (link below to sign up!) or you’ve read my journal entry 10  but if not it was inspired by one of my favourite photos of my boys and me during a very special moment we shared together on a rock by of the shore of Loch Lomond. This area is very much a work in progress at the moment but it’s a start. I’m planning to use the rock in one of the creature episodes, so I’m just doing the groundwork in more ways than one.

I’ve also been experimenting with lots of tree related things and different ways of modelling them, but nothing is complete enough to show you at the moment. Hopefully that will be something for my next journal entry.

MUSINGS AND A surprise

One of my coping mechanisms is to hyper-focus on work when things get tough emotionally so unsurprisingly there has been a bit of scope creep with this project in the last month or so. I think it will be really positive for the project and my skills though (as long as I can figure out how to do it!). It does mean that it will just take a bit longer to release the first episode, but I think it will definitely be worth doing… and Graham agrees, which is nice. I promise I’m not procrastinating this time, there is a very considered plan and reasoning behind what I’m doing!

Before I tell you more, first a bit of context; There has been an idea for an element that I’ve wanted to include in the Vale bouncing around in my brain for quite a while but I couldn’t work out how to do it from either a story point of view or from my ‘current skill level as a digital artist’ point of view. 

That was until I got a brainwave one evening a couple of weeks ago. As so often happens to me, it came after spending time in nature and more specifically this time going for a long walk through a forest that means a huge amount to Graham and I. It was the first time since we lost Alf nearly two years ago that I’d dared to venture back to one of our special places and yes I did burst into tears mere metres into the trail (luckily it was a mid week afternoon so there was no one there to see it). It was a spur of the moment decision to go as it was such a beautiful day, but I’m so glad we did because it was the first time I’d felt some semblance of inner peace for quite a while. I know this might sound a bit out there to some, but I felt like our boys were there with us, I’ve never felt anything like it before, the closest I can get to describing it is a knowing feeling - like I knew they were just around the next corner accompanied by an immense feeling of peace and gratitude.

The sunlight filtering through the trees was magical and it felt like stepping into another realm, away from all the problems of the world for an afternoon.

We hadn’t gone on a walk like this in nearly two years and it made me realise how important they are. When we had the boys we used to walk for hours and hours at the weekends discussing our thoughts, ideas and dreams. The beginnings of Ayane Studios where figured out while following a pair of white tipped black and grey tails darting through the undergrowth as we humans tried to keep up with the exuberance/ exuberant pace of spaniel kind. 

While I understood how deeply I miss having a dog, I really didn’t appreciated how much I’d missed the long walks and our talks until our forest walk. 

Over the course of several subsequent walks Graham and I discussed and developed my brainwave idea. In the process it revealed some very important things to us. Things that are fundamental to what makes us excited about our work and how we want Ayane Studios to grow. I think it would be best if I talked to you about our revelations in a video, so I have made myself a note to do so in either in our first episode or a studio diary. 

But I won’t leave you hanging on the idea itself - I’m excited to announce that we will actually be introducing you to a character in our first episode and that they will be a recurring character in the Vale of Araluen episodes. That character is The Phoenix, the bird you see in our logo. I will tell you all about it in my next journal entry.

Thank you for reading, with love,