APRIL arttimes

It's been such a whirlwind of artmaking all month. I've been juggling a lot of projects one day at a time, and progressing steadily towards..something?? Definitely not profit lmao. Here are some pictures from the adventure. Sara and I played a short set at our friend Drew's birthday party. I brought some paint, with permission from the homeowner, to decorate the walls that were about to get repainted, and another arty-Sara-friend painted this incredible aurora scene on an unsanctioned wall (with her fingers, because I did not bring paint brushes :) :) )--but it was so beloved, she was asked to come back and paint some more.

We finally started tracking the album, which after all of the setbacks and pauses, is a huge relief. Drums are all done, and I am starting the guitar tracks today. I was able to do a work-trade with SRS to borrow some really nice mics for the drums. There's so much to learn. I've done a lot of long long days practicing guitar, making certain that all of the parts are intentional and tight. Yesterday I did a straight-up 9-to-5.

I've been going really hard on the digital art too. I started 3D modeling a lighthouse for the Chameleon Girl project in blender, and I've been casually drawing character design ideas for Hilda and Helga, mostly just putting them next to each other proportionally and finding their similarities/differences. I'm not great at drawing, so it's been good to spend so much time on it. I'm finally at a point in both blender and krita where the hot keys come naturally and the workflow is steady. It takes a long time to adjust to a tool, and there's always a strange dissociative hurdle to cross with digital tools.

I've also been working on a new Psychic Spychick website. I bought a domain, and frankly the .net was marginally more expensive than the .com but it was a unanimous creative decision. It's a chaotic mess, and for now that is just the aesthetic I'm leaning into. I am glad I just did-the-thing and made a website in Wordpress a couple of years ago, but it's so much more satisfying to work in the blank-page coding space, where I have complete control and don't have to deal with a clunky graphic interface and hidden APIs I didn't ask for. Also JavaScript is a great puzzle to knock my head against. If we are really going to make a video game someday, I'm going to have to get a lot better at puzzling out and writing object-oriented code. I'm working on an animation for the front page that I will share when it's got some moving parts. I'm almost done with the base model.

Happy springtime

~amelia