Stubborn or Determined?<em>I don’t like to give up on things, which has led to me being labelled as stubborn, but I prefer determined</em>
I have been labelled as ‘stubborn’ for most of my life, but I prefer to think of myself as determined. Some might say this is semantics but as someone who has a bit of an obsession with learning languages and the meaning of words and names I think the distinction is an important one.
The definition of stubborn is ‘rigid, resisting reason and change even when wrong’ while determination is defined as ‘flexible, driven by purpose, open to feedback and willing to adapt the method to achieve the desired goal, even if it means changing course’. In short a determined person adapts the plan while a stubborn person bangs their head against the same brick wall, refusing to budge. Therefore stubbornness is not a positive trait, while determination is.
You might be wondering why I’m discussing this - well it’s because determination has been required by the bucketload over the past couple of weeks. It turns out that creating the compound curved tower windows has been tricky, very tricky in fact and a lot harder than the domed ballroom roof. I think it was the seventh attempt at drawing them that I actually achieved the look I wanted, each previous attempt having had one limitation or another with regard to creating a really nice smooth surface. But I got there and I learned a lot along the way and this is why the distinction between being stubborn and determined matters. I kept trying new things, learning from each attempt and adapting my construction method until I figured it out. I was determined to figure it out.
How you think of yourself matters. For a very long time I was an ardent people-pleaser and what other people thought of me impacted how I thought about myself and influenced what I did. I now know that the only thing I was really doing was betraying myself.
Alfie (red collar) and Jasper (blue collar) and me by Loch Lomond, 2013
Soul-searching
Being Alfie and Jasper’s human was a privilege, they brought me so much joy, taught me how to be a better person and gave me real purpose when a lot of my people-pleasing life choices were doing the exact opposite. So when cancer took Jasper away from us in December 2022 and Alfie in August 2024, I fell apart. Losing them both has been absolutely horrendous.
Without my boys I didn’t know who I was anymore, or what my purpose was. After I figured out how to keep my head above the crushing waves of grief months and months after losing my Alf, I began doing a lot of soul-searching far away from the world.
Since then I’ve delved deep into the locked away places in my heart, mind and soul and in so doing I’ve questioned everything I know about myself, everything I’ve been taught and everything I believed. It has been difficult and exhausting work, work that has made me feel incredibly vulnerable, but it has also been immensely freeing. It’s been like untangling a huge ball of knotted up wool and then knitting into something beautiful that fits perfectly.
I feel like for the first time in my life I can now say that I know who I am, what I stand for and more importantly, I know the person I want to work towards being in the future. I have let go of what no longer serves me which has made more space for what does, and also for new things. I have also created my own little code to live by, which has proved to be incredibly powerful so far, as it has given me a new purpose and is helping me to make decisions and build strong boundaries. It is also helping fuel my courage and my determination.
The work of Brené Brown - who I have admired both as a person and a researcher for years - has helped me in this endeavour. During my curved window drawing battles these past two weeks I listened to this podcast (I really recommend listening to it, it’s fascinating) where she said something that stopped me in my tracks;
“feeling joy is so vulnerable that we dress rehearse tragedy to prepare for disappointment.”
Queue that ringing sound of silence in your ears when you realise something important has just happened… she went on to discuss how this keeps us trapped in a small and unfulfilled, disappointing life - the very thing we’re trying to avoid. I have been doing this my entire life, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially when something good happens.
So dear reader I’m ‘daring greatly’ [a term Brené defines as having the courage to be vulnerable, showing up authentically in life despite fear, and embracing imperfection to live fully] and sharing my imperfect work from the past two weeks with you.
New front tower windows : Triple ‘Lantern Window’ on the top floor + tall column windows on the 1st and 2nd floors to tie together the main building and orangery windows
Front Facade
Both the ‘lantern windows’ at the top and the main column windows on the front towers are definitely a product of my ‘play and evolve’ philosophy. The only constraints I put on myself was to carry on evolving the style I’d created with the ballroom and avoid making the towers look too much like a lighthouse…which I think I’ve just about managed to do. My initial scheme only had a window at the front of the tower facing the loch. But as I fought with the construction I kept thinking, if that were a room in my house I’d want more windows to look out at the view, especially as it looks out over a magical creature sanctuary!
I’ve tried really hard to make sure that all the window designs are different on the different areas of the castle but that they are all using the same design language. The lantern window design is a combination of the orangery windows and the phoenix window above the front door but with slightly different metal framing that takes it cues from the ballroom skylight through the double banding in the centre.
The triple layout was a happy accident which was the result of me duplicating the first window to modify the construction into a small circular design - one on each side of the tower. But I liked the look of the duplicate of the front window once I’d rotated it through 90 degrees into place so much I decided to keep it, I then duplicated it a second time and rotated it to the other side of the tower which I liked even more, and so it was - a top floor lantern (that hopefully doesn’t look too much like a lighthouse!). I feel like this coming together the way it did was my reward for all the effort I’d gone to draw the initial window, that to finish the top floor was a much easier job than I thought it was going to be…
The tower column windows are a hybrid of the main building and the orangery windows as they sit in the middle of these two styles. I’ve also carried the double framing from the top floor window so it runs vertically through the whole tower.
Back Facade
I’ve been focusing on the front of the castle a lot over the last couple of months, so this fortnight I’ve worked hard to bring the back facade up to the same standard. I’ve done a before and after for you again so you can see the difference, I hope you’ll agree it’s a nice step forward.
New rear facade : Rear tower windows and orangery windows
I actually drew the rear tower window first as I thought it was going to be the more difficult one to draw… I was wrong, the larger radius meant the curvature was flatter than the front tower which made it easier. I learned a lot about mesh density drawing these windows. The standard ‘shade smooth’ face / edge smoothing that is applied to geometry played havoc with the shape until I increased the density to quite a high level due to the compound curves. I actually ended up putting a ‘shade smooth’ node into the several branches of the metal framework trees and set it to ‘off’ as I found it achieved a better result with these thinner frame sections.
The big rear tower window is basically a more fancy version of the end orangery windows and I just had to add in a tiered pendulum light cluster to illuminate it from behind. There’s a couple of little details I want to add to the framework around the main rear two window, but otherwise I think the back facade is now complete.
Orangery end window
thoughts, tasks and notes
I’m really happy with how the windows have turned out and I’m glad that I persevered with my design concept even though my poor brain melted several times in the process of drawing it. I think that the Castle has really ‘come alive’ now that I've cut in all the windows and put lights in the rooms to illuminate them.
I decided to delay publishing this journal entry for a couple of days so that I could complete the majority of the window work as my progress was hampered a bit last week by a bit of a spanner in the works. I won’t bore you with the details but the short version of a several day saga was that a Windows update which included an update to my graphics card driver caused lots of z clipping issues to appear on my model (which basically made lots of areas look like black voids where surfaces overlapped - normally the clever behind the scenes maths calculates this out and only one surface is displayed).
This forced me to update to the latest version of Blender - Blender 5 (something I wasn’t planning on doing until I’d finished doing all the 3D modelling) which led to the nasty surprise of not being able to open my ‘Vale of Araluen’ project file in Blender 5 for reasons I still don’t fully understand. The solution I eventually found deep inside a forum post was to append (copy the geometry and all it’s construction attributes from one file to another) my 100+ geometry collections individually into a brand new file… it was a little stressful as for a while it looked like I was going to have to start all over again. But I was determined to find a solution!
On the positive side, this presented me with an opportunity to have a really good tidy up of my model and get rid of all the various iterations and attempts that I’d kept just incase they might be useful. The other plus is that Blender 5 is a huge step forward both in terms of UI and functionality, so I’m actually quite glad I was forced into updating to it a bit earlier than planned. I just would have preferred my original file to have opened nicely…
So checking in with my tasklist for this block;
| # | Task | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Update rear tower 3rd floor window | Complete | - |
| 2. | Update front tower 3rd floor windows | Complete | - |
| 3. | Update front tower column windows | Complete | - |
| 4. | Update rear tower column window | Nearly Complete | Outer frame needs tweaking plus ability to open needs adding |
| 5. | Cut in all main building windows on 1st, second and 3rd floors | Complete | The arched portico window plus the east and west side windows on the 3rd floor need doing |
| 6. | Cut in the arched windows on the towers | Complete | - |
| 7. | Add in room dividers so lighting is more controllable and easy to zone | Nearly Complete | All towers and the ballroom are done, but all the rooms around the perimeter of the ballroom on floors 1 - 3 need doing. |
| 8. | Upgrade to Blender 5 | Complete | - |
| 9. | Tidy up castle model | Complete | - |
What’s next?
Firstly I need to finish off the uncompleted tasks on my list above. But once I’ve done that the modelling phase of the castle will be complete which is a major milestone.
In the new year I’m planning to shift my focus to the landscaping - sorting out the terracing walls, the lawns, the loch and the forest. The photo above of my woofles sitting with me on a rock by Loch Lomond is a very special memory for me and it is the inspiration for the view from the castle. Creating a model of this is going to be my next challenge!
I think I’m going to scale the landscape back a little bit from its current mocked up state so I can move forward with creating the first animation in this series. My thinking at the moment is that I’ll build out the other areas of ‘The Vale’ for each character’s episode.
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To those of you who celebrate the seasonal transitions happy winter solstice, may your home and life be full of joy and light. Whichever winter holiday you celebrate, I hope these last couple of weeks of this year are joyful and bright and that the new year is a healthy and happy one for you and all those you love.
Thank you for reading, with love,
