Shaping waterfalls<em>A slight change of plans, but I promise it makes sense</em>
In my previous journal post I said I was going to concentrate on ‘planting’ more of the Visken forest, but I quickly realised that I needed to sort out the ground beneath its boughs first otherwise I was going to be placing trees in places that didn’t make sense and create more work for myself.
So these past couple of weeks I’ve been sculpting the landscape of ‘The Vale’ to make it look a lot more cohesive. I’ve gradually knitted together the lawns and the loch banks, the mountains and the river plains and begun integrating the pathways and driveway. (See below for a before and after picture to show you what I mean) It might not look like I’ve done a huge amount but trust me at lot of podcasts have been listened to in the making of this! It has been a very time consuming but also a highly enjoyable process. I’m pretty new to mesh sculpting but I’ve had a lot of fun doing it and with each day I’ve been getting a little quicker and better at creating the shapes I want.
A sort of Tech Review
I’ve been very grateful for my Wacom graphics tablet (I have a Cintiq Pro 24) while I’ve been sculpting the landscape. It is my favourite piece of ‘wishlist’ studio equipment I’ve bought to date. It wasn’t cheap and I thought long and hard before buying it a couple of years ago, but I think it’s definitely worth the money. I’d wanted a graphics tablet for years and this one is pretty awesome. The accuracy of the stylus is incredible, it’s like using a pencil on paper with the added bonus of an undo button! I’ve felt like a proper digital artist over the last couple of weeks while I’ve been working away on the landscape, which has made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Using the graphics tablet has made it possible for me to sculpt in a much higher level of detail than I would have been able to do using a mouse. There is no way I would have been able to create some of the transitions I’ve created without it and certainly not without giving myself horrendous RSI! I highly recommend getting a graphics tablet if you think you would like to do sculpting in Blender. I haven’t tried using any other graphics tablet brands other than Wacom, so I don’t know how different models compare. But I would definitely recommend the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24.
The Waterfalls
Waterfalls are one of my favourite things, they look, sound and feel like raw nature. So many of the hikes I’ve done over the years were chosen because of the waterfalls along the route. I find them simultaneously awe-inspiring and calming. The sheer energy of them is one of the few things that can make me be fully present in that moment and not chasing my thoughts around the 4D helter skelter of past and future thoughts, ideas and fears that rattles through my mind constantly.
As ‘The Vale’ is essentially my ‘dream place’ there had to be waterfalls - one is nice, two is better… and four is even better. They are inspired by waterfalls I’ve visited in Scotland, The Lake District and Austria. One day I hope to visit Skógafoss in Iceland, it’s very much at the top of my waterfall bucket list.
It was quite tricky to get the waterfalls sheets to look like they were complying with the laws of physics, I’m sure I made it more difficult than it should have been due to my lack of experience in Blender but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. I know there are all sorts of waterfall assets that you can buy and that you can use very complicated waterfall simulations for realism. But as I’ve said before that’s not what I’m going for with ‘The Vale of Araluen’, I wanted to create my own and I’ve got a very specific art style in my head that I’m trying to create.
What I’ve managed to do over the past couple of weeks is on the right track, there lots of shading effects and animation I want to try and layer into it to get the look I’m after. But I’m going to leave that for when I’m doing the detailed material and shading work once the ‘surfacing’ (meaning shape definition) is done.
None of the waterfalls have names yet, if you have any suggestions let me know in the comments below! One of the waterfalls hides the entrance to a huge cave network - which is going to be fun to draw when I get to the episode about the creatures that frequent it! I have so many ideas for ‘The Vale’, my ability to draw it all is most definitely the bottleneck! If you want to make sure you don’t miss news about that please subscribe - it’s free, the link to sign up is at the bottom of this page!
The castle now has a more defined landscape to sit in - it really starting to come together now which is very exciting!
This journal entry gave me a very pleasant surprise while I was putting it together. Specifically the ‘before and after’ shots. I honestly hadn’t appreciated quite how much I’d done until I did all the little slideshows, hence my comments in the opening paragraph about it looking like I haven’t done very much. I decided to leave that in rather than edit it out because I think it highlights how easy it is to criticise ourselves for not living up to either our own expectations or those of others. These days I am a lot less worried about the latter, but I have always been my own worst critic and harshest taskmistress. The point I’m taking the long and winding route to, is that this post has really emphasised the importance to me of documenting my work. As in those moments where my ISG (imposter syndrome gremlin) starts to rattle in its cage, belching out doubt and negativity into my thoughts this journal gives me a body of evidence to prove that the opposite to all that is true. In short, these posts are really helping me sure up and begin strengthening my paper-thin confidence. If you struggle with your own ISG, I recommend giving documenting a try - it doesn’t have to be in the form of a blog visible to the world (eek!), a notepad, sketchbook or simply an album of photos on your phone will be more than fine. It’s the process that counts.
Reclaiming Time
Writing my previous journal post really got me thinking about how I’ve been gradually applying my version of ‘colour loving minimalism’ to more than just my stuff and the benefits of doing so. How I question the value of everything in my life far more than I used to in order to try and make better and more conscious decisions. (By value I don’t mean monetary value I mean value to me weighed against my own personal code). Perhaps it’s just a natural progression of decluttering? Given that I have gone through the process of choosing what items I think are valuable enough or useful enough to earn their right to stay and why. With less physical stuff, chores and mundane routines take less time, buying oneself more physical space and headspace to contemplate other things. Alternatively perhaps it’s my age or just me, but I don’t think so because I’ve been seeing more and more video recommendations in my YouTube feed recently about ‘digital decluttering’, ‘digital minimalism’ and ‘analogue switches’. All of which seem to be coming to a similar conclusion, our digital lives are as cluttered as our IRL ones, if not more so and it’s contributing to our already high levels of stress, sleep deprivation, lack of time and dwindling finances. These are compounding negatives which drain us.
The benefits of declutter whether in IRL or digitally are the exact opposite of all this - but to me the biggest benefit of all is the reclaiming of genuine ‘free time’ which I define as time where I’m not stressing or having to deal with anything else. Time that I can choose what I want to do with.
To give you an example which on the face of it seems like ‘normal’ stuff decluttering but is actually about far more… about two months ago I decided of my own volition (prior to seeing the aforementioned video recommendations) to stop wearing my Apple Watch and to instead switch back to my analogue watch (or ticky watch as I’ve been affectionately referring to it). I did this for a variety of reasons that I won’t bore you with, but the two reasons that are relevant to the point I want to make are;
To reduce the amount of data I’m providing to the tech broligarchs.
To reduce the amount of tech that I own that’s on a rolling update cycle thereby reducing my ‘averaged yearly tech investment’.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from my analogue switch experiment but it definitely wasn’t the sense of calm that I’ve got from doing it. I was surprised to realise quite how often I had been doing the watch equivalent of doom scrolling and how often I had been getting distracted by the notifications from it. This was despite me having turned off almost all the notifications, leaving only the ‘important ones’ (phone calls, text messages, calendar stuff etc). As a consequence of my analogue switch I noticed that I was less anxious, my attention span was considerably better and that I was getting a lot more done. Which bought me back yet more and time and got me thinking further…
Which led me to apply the two criteria I listed above to lots of other things in my digital life. The biggest one I’ve tackled so far is how I manage my projects. The software I had been using up until this point was good, but it wasn’t quite right for me. To get it to do what I wanted it to do was becoming pretty hard to manage and more than a little overwhelming, plus I really didn’t like how much of my data ‘they’ (as in the tech bros) potentially had access to.
So over the last three weeks alongside all my landscape sculpting I’ve built my own project management spreadsheet (which is much more pleasing to my artist sensibilities as it is a lot more colourful!) There are multiple sheets in my spreadsheet, but I won’t bore you with them all, I’ll just show you a screenshot of a week from the weekly planner sheet to give you the general gist so to speak.
The eagle eyed amongst you will notice that there is a ‘Project 2’ listed in my spreadsheet - more on this soon, I’m very excited to share this project with you all!
No, I don’t get notifications to remind me about each item, but does it matter? Again no, because everything I need to work through each week goes into this sheet fed off a master list. One sheet, one reference, simples. Plus I can quickly add in new items when I need to. (If you’re wondering ‘PD’ stands for personal development… I know I’m a nerd, sorry not sorry!)
Yes, it was a time investment to build it, but it is already saving me time in the long run and I feel a lot more ‘on top of things’ and less overwhelmed. Additionally I’ve been able to take back my data sovereignty and make something a lot more customisable to meet my exact needs. It’s actually an added bonus that I’ve cut out another set of notifications in the process! W :)
These days we are bombarded with notifications and distractions that constantly vie for our attention 24hrs a day. But it really doesn’t have to be that way, I’m old enough to know that people were able to function prior to smart phones - arguably far better!
So much of what we are notified about isn’t actually adding any value or providing useful knowledge to us. In my experience almost all notifications fall into four categories, ‘trying to sell you stuff’ , ‘noise’, ‘useful/need to know’ and ‘joy’. The latter two make it through the digital declutter cut while the first two are just time and energy sinkholes that in a lot of cases can be increasingly classified as ‘brainrot’ content.
My latest round of experiments has made me as much of a proponent of digital decluttering as I am of physical decluttering. It really is staggering to realise how much better life can be after doing them and how much time you can get back. One thing I do want to stress though is that they are both very much ‘stitch in time’ exercises; they both take time to do, but they are most definitely net positive if you see the process through. In fact the project management spreadsheet I built has proved to be so useful that I made a personal version to help me organise my life better which was very much worth doing.
So what have I done with my latest pocket of reclaimed time? Well inspired by;
a dear friend talking about and showing me pages from the beautiful nature journal he is creating this year filled with his paintings, sketches and musings.
finding my new favourite YouTuber - the fabulous artist Brooke Cormier, if you don’t know her I urge you to check out her channel, where she shares thoughtful and thought provoking insights about being an artist and of course her beautiful paintings.
the amount of sketching that features in Bridgerton season 4 (which is hands down the best season so far imho!)
And frankly just wanting to do more of something I used to love to do and get better at it - I have been building a daily sketching practice.
A sketch of some blossom from my garden, that I worked on over a couple of days… incremental steps
This has delivered yet another surprise, it too is contributing to my sense of calm and joy - which set against the utter chaos of the world at the moment is so very welcome and most definitely adding value to my life.
Next….
I really would like to try and finish all the landscape sculpting in the next couple of weeks. So I’m going to concentrate on that, and if I complete that I’ll start planting trees and shrubs.
Thank you for reading, with love,
