A sense of wonder

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I added this almost as an addendum to my post yesterday about gear but I’m going to highlight it just because 🙂

Since I resubbed I’ve been struck several times about how beautiful the environment is. Now some of that is because it’s now rendered in gorgeous ultrawide, and because I can actually see what I’m looking at as it’s not all so dark *rolls eyes* but I think it’s also because I’m prepared to see it. I felt this way when I resubbed for Legion and that was on the old dark screen.

Prior to that I would say the last time I felt a sense of wonder re: environment was when I saw the Valley of the Four Winds for the first time (a very light zone). My breath caught in my throat as my character crested the hill and I just went WOW because WOW.

I remember playing Swtor once, on the Imperial Agent, and my jaw was on the floor at the animations and how I could snipe across platforms (warcraft would give line of sight errors for that) and it was anyway just an incredible moment.

In the post yesterday I said that my main point was if the game is broken down into simple terms it’s “hit buttons and stuff dies” and so while the buttons might change sequence a little (alts) or the mobs might change (encounters), it’s still just hit buttons and stuff dies. There has to be some kind of immersing factor to transcend what the hands are doing, so that it feels fresh and different and fun otherwise there’s no playability.

These days I sometimes narrate what I’m doing, like if I’m on my pally I’ll respond to dialogue on the screen with stuff like “I’m Tirion Fordrings heir, I’m the light I will save you!” etc. or on my Demon Hunter I’m the biggest spacebar clown in the world and I’ll often say wheee when I glide off stuff and cackle because in some respects Demon Hunters got flight early :p

I also try and be thematically appropriate in my choice of race/class combo, and sometimes even spec. Like my Void Elf had to be a Priest because of shadows so duh has to be shadow spec. I used to be Disc mostly on my old priest so shadow is actually entirely new to me. If I ever play my Nightborne, that’s a mage and I’ll spec arcane because duh magic hehe.

My Demon Hunter can wield other weapons but I always instantly transmog back into Warglaives because nothing else is appropriate imo. Since being granted Ashbringer my pally refuses to wield anything else. You know stuff like that.

The game is just a game where you hit buttons and stuff dies unless you make it more than that. You can make it more in whatever fashion feels right for you but I guess I’m just saying a sense of wonder helps, you enjoying the sights of the world and the animations and of course very fundamentally (for me at least) the story.

It’s not all about gear

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I’m sorry I gotta. I just read today’s The Queue on Blizzard Watch and there was a question basically saying “haven’t played in a bit, what should I do?” and the suggestion said “quickest way to gear up” and then “fill any gear holes” and then “group content aka mythic+” and I just looked at it and went really?

Blogging about stuff is actually super cool because I have an archive which goes back to early 2012 and I’d already been playing Warcraft for about three years at that point. So I don’t have my perspective from day one but I do have my transition from solo player —> pick-up raid healer —> raid healer —> raid tank —> raid leader/main tank —> solo player.

It’s funny considering how much raid tanking I wound up doing, and how much I preferred it to healing, that I have an article from 2012 explaining how much I hated raid tanking. You see actually I never hated it, it’s just that it scared the heebie-jeebies out of me. Once I got to the point that I felt I could do better than the PUGs my guild was forced to call in, I realized that I wanted to tank and then I really grew to enjoy it.

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Progress Tracking

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I try and find artists to follow so I can learn from them. One thing I’ve noticed is that they do a status report each year, much like I used to do when I was writing a lot. They do like a neat graphic showing everything they drew that year. The boxes are even, rather than the mess above, but then this is covering multiple years.

This is a starting point. I think I wrote a post about “where I begin” some time back as I think it was when I was drawing that picture June 2017 I decided I wanted to actively attempt to improve. So I guess where I am now is less a starting point, and more a point somewhere down the road. I prefer to think of it as a starting point so I can excuse how awful I still am but let’s gloss over that.

Anyway, I’ve done posts about all the pictures in 2018 I think, saying what I think went ok and what was bad, and what I needed to focus on improving next. So I’m not going to say anything, I’m just going to let this timeline speak for itself.

February Art

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Well all of my New Years resolutions have gone to shit so far except the “draw every month” thing which on month two is still a thing – yay! 🙂

Right so what was good? what was bad?

I’ve always struggled to pin down my ‘style’ and some of my earlier pieces are quite frankly shocking because I’ve wanted it to look good but just gone crazy with brushes and it’s looked awful. With this I tried to embrace the ‘less is more’ concept, so there’s more a suggestion of shadows on the faces, rather than me trying to shade everything and it looking weird.

HG’s pose is bad. I used references, I tried so hard but it just looks wrong, but I had this image in my head to replicate – this was the kind of composition I wanted and so I did my best with it. I’m much happier with Myka, I’m particularly pleased with her nose. I don’t think she looks very much like herself, for all HG is the poorer drawing, I think she looks more like herself.

I think the hair on both of them is ok. Not great and the more I look at it, the worse it gets. I think the clothing wrinkles on both of them are patchy in terms of quality. The ones on Myka’s back I think are ok, and the ones on HG’s arm aren’t bad either but hampered by the awful pose.

Next time – like always – I need to focus more on getting the basics right to begin with. Smooth fluid lines, put life into the drawing before I add colour. I need to work on my clothing wrinkles as a priority for sure. Materials in general to be honest otherwise I’m never going to be able to draw a car or a spaceship but that’s a whole other conversation.

Yesterday was a bad day

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I wrote a couple of “I don’t know what to do” posts because I’m not being productive how I would like.

Then it got worse.

You know how sometimes it’s not what happens, so much as what it triggers? Well what happened yesterday shouldn’t have been that big a deal but it felt like the final nail in the coffin. I have been feeling very hopeless and despairing and what happened felt like validation of those feelings. I haven’t got even close to halfway with NaNo, I’m writing less in a year than I used to do in a month – I feel like I’m losing myself.

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Trying to find a solution

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My 2019 creative resolutions mostly boiled down to “be kinder to myself” but after the utter trainwreck that was January I need to remind myself of what I said because I’m not applying it..

This was an actual line I wrote:

forget what I ‘should’ be working on and rediscover my joy in just working on what I please 

and this one

.. to forgive myself when things don’t go according to plan

You see it’s the old ‘I know it intellectually but utterly fail at putting it into practice’ dilemma.

Now half the problem is that I wrote these resolutions during christmas break and even when I try and be reasonable I always underestimate how much of a toll university takes. I hate it, I literally do, there is nothing about it which I like but I’m committed and I wish I knew how to shut off. How to partition my life better so that the negativity about uni didn’t spill over into absolutely everything else making me feel awful all the time. I don’t know if it’s because of my mental issues that I struggle so much at this, or if it’s this hard for everyone (it probably is and I’m just being a wimp).

But anyway, it is what it is and I can’t change the uni part of the equation. I need it too much. I need the student loan and I need the time that loan buys me to get my shit together, which is terrifying me beyond measure because what if I can’t? What if being this utterly miserable and stupid means I don’t, what if this is just a wasted exercise? I feel sick just thinking that. I need to not think about that because it’s too big, it’s too scary and I can’t deal.

Moving on – back to the point of this post which wasn’t to indulge in a pity party, it was to find a solution – “rediscover my joy in just working on what I please”

I was explaining ideas to my friend Marie last night, and I used the words ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘can’t’ several times. I’m still limiting myself, still denying myself, still saying no and it’s logical for me to do so but it’s not working. I’m not working on what I’m supposed to – I’m doing nothing – and so at this point is something – anything – better than nothing?

2012 NaNo comes to mind. I didn’t want to work on Perfidy, I wasn’t feeling it, so I just started typing what was in my head. I wrote 5k of a story which I then abandoned because I went back to Perfidy and wrote the first draft (of that version anyway). So a diversion doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it can lead back to the main road, and if it helps at the time then maybe that’s ok? I can’t even convince myself here.

I still don’t know what to do.

2019: January Report

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I started this post on tumblr but I just can’t bring myself to post it. I never posted my goals for 2019 on there because I had an attack of the self-consciousness and kept them to myself. I’m desperate for support, desperate for somebody to say something, but I can’t put myself out there. I’d be screaming into the void anyway, as I don’t think there’s a community in the world that could actually put up with me. I just want someone to tell me it’s not my fault I guess, even though I really do think it kinda is.

Anyway, things aren’t going well, things are going pretty damn awful actually and I don’t really know what to do with myself. My goals for January were:

  • Word Count: 2,363/16,000 (15%)
  • Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
  • Divided finished
  • Big Bang Art finished

And you can see what happened ^^ which was not a lot basically. Those words were on Painting Layers of Love so I have half a first draft of the chapter. I guess you could argue progress was made but it’s nowhere near what I needed, and I was being super lenient with the goals in my opinion. They should have been achievable so this failure is all the worse for that.

University is going terribly. I’m not attending my lecture as I can’t cope with it, and I missed doing my first formative assignment for one of the modules. In another module I’m finding a project incredibly hard to deal with, and so I’m barely coping with that. I think #NotCoping or #BarelyCoping is kinda the theme for the month which is just pathetic.

So let’s try this again. February Goals:

  • Word Count: 0/16,000
  • Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
  • Divided finished
  • An art piece finished

I’m not exactly reaching for the stars there as it’s basically the same as January but I don’t know what else to put. I have to do the January stuff, and as I didn’t do it in January it gets shifted. I just hope to merlin I put my big girl pants on and February turns out better because I can’t bear the idea of shifting the same tasks to March. I mean that completely undermines the point of a deadline. I suck so much, I really do, I’m awful and just yeah, this is hopeless really but I’m going to try.

Existential Crisis

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Time is finite. It is a universal truth that we never have enough, but I certainly don’t feel like I spend what time I have wisely.

The truth is I’m overwhelmed so much. It’s easier to ‘check out’ and while away the hours doing something mindless, than it it to dig in to something important.

It comes down to two conflicting issues
– Priorities
– Spoons

I get easily distracted and side-tracked – probably because I’m so terrified all the time – and so things I should prioritise, like my writing, often take a backseat. It’s like the thing I care about the most, and should therefore do the most, is what I don’t do due to the fear. So is it a failure of prioritising? Or is it that simply I’m not capable of doing the thing due to spoons?

I wish I knew how much was my fault, and how much is just something I can’t control. I know that it sounds stupid saying I can’t control myself but mental illness is like that. Normal people can just grit their teeth and dig deep, but I have already dug as deep as possible and there’s literally no more gas in the tank to push on. Having said that mental illness also does this trick of suggesting there is more you can do “if you just try harder” after you’ve given up as like a sick guilt-trip. It’s hard to know the truth, did I give up too early? Or was I truly incapable of doing more?

So the simple truth is I don’t know. It’s the end of January today, I had goals and I’m nowhere near them and that hurts me. I despair of myself, of life in general, I feel like things will never get better – and that’s my fault! Because I’m not trying hard enough, I know what I should do and if I want things to be better, then I need to be better and do more and actually make it better – it’s not going to get better on it’s own!

It’s just so frustrating because I can’t seem to make it work. Is that because I’m lazy? It that because I prioritise the wrong things? Or is it just that I do the best I can, with what I can manage (even if that’s not what I should be doing) because that’s all I can do? I have no idea. I don’t know if I should blame myself or not, but I kinda am and I do feel like shit which is quite self-defeating because the worse I feel, the more I’ll slip into the abyss of despair and the harder it will be to dredge up the spoons to do anything.

I’m sad, and I’m scared, and I don’t know what to do.

Illustrated Cover for RBB

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This is half of my art for the Rumbelle Big Bang.

With this I tried very hard with my lighting. I discovered the lighting panel in Poser and so there are ground shadows and bouncing green light from the portal, and also some definitive shadows from each other I guess which I drew with the lasso tool.

What I learned is that I need greater differentiation on the colours. I did texture Rumple and Bae’s hair but it’s not really visible on screen (it was a lot more visible on my graphics tablet). The same with the tree/foliage in the background above the energy shield. I can see it fine on my graphics tablet but it’s not really visible on my monitor. Some of that is due to the poor colour accuracy on my monitor but greater difference will make it pop more, so it’s still worth bearing in mind.

I need to vary my line weight, particularly looking at the jaw line and maybe the colour of the lines, not sure. I definitely overwork it. It’s a style thing again I guess and there is too much softness for a true comic look. I use the soft painting brush for the shadows and I should probably stick more with the lasso tool, less is more and all that.

So next time try for greater differentiation, less softness, trust my lines more and make less of them.

Another year

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I’m 28 and I feel old.

Now anyone older than me would say that is ridiculous, that I’m still young etc. but the big times of year always cause introspection in me. Not so long ago, although I suppose best part of a decade now, I used to get very fired up around New Year. It was driven by desperation and self-loathing admittedly, but the point was I saw the changing of the year as this ‘magical’ moment where I could turn my life around. I bought into the hype of the ‘new year’ basically.

I’m not entirely sure when my mentality shifted, during the last few years I lost hope I guess and I came to my current belief about the new year. That there is nothing magical or special about the clock ticking over from one day to the next. That the only difference about a changing year is that I’m a year closer to death – cheery much? – but the introspection does make me feel like that. Like it’s another year gone, I’m still a failure, still useless, and as much as I want the upcoming year to be my year I have no real faith that will happen.

The truth is “being better is so much harder.”

There is a reason that most new years resolutions fail within just a couple of days. It is easy to have the idea, to know that you ‘should’ do something, it is very difficult to have the discipline to day-in, day-out, make that happen.

I woke up this morning with the same aches and pains, the same heavy weight, the same whispers in my mind – it’s the same battle, and it being 2019 doesn’t change that. Yeah I set goals, and yeah I really want them to happen. I’m going to do my best but I guess even on the 1st I’m preparing myself for disappointment.

Fighting an endless war is exhausting and a date on a calendar doesn’t change that.