I am sure that you have noticed that over the past few months I have been clearing out the old and rearranging just about every social site that I use in preparation for what is all but a total relaunch of pretty much everything.
I would like to clarify, this is not because I am ashamed of what has been in any way but merely where my skills in 3D have improved so vastly it seems slightly careless to put new against old, however this is not merely limited to images from way back when I first started out but even images created but a few months ago.
During my quiet time I have stripped everything back to it's barest elements and approached it with a very new mindset, one geared towards creating far higher quality worlds and one where I manufacture close on 100 percent of everything seen in the images.
Of course over the past five years I have shifted from using Daz to Blender and I utterly love Blender but now I am looking to move again and the problem is that many sites simply don't support any of the software that I am looking into moving onto.
Simply put this is basically a pivotal moment of my development, not just as a 3D artist and Author but also as a person, the irony in some ways being that I forewarned myself of this exact moment arriving some three years ago.
Three years ago I created Scorpio, my first true character in the sense that she wasn't merely created by luck or fortune as Evelyn, Fae and Savena were, but a purpose made and sculpted being, meticulously crafted for the singular purpose of telling a very new kind of story to what had come before.
Scorpio of course was the first of these new lines of characters, with Isla coming along, again a character sculpted and crafted with a specific purpose to fill the fantasy and folklore side of stories that I had become disconnected from.
These stories are intentionally written to have a very different level of depth and immersion to anything I had written before, with vast worlds with hundreds of beings present and accounted throughout. Of course the first thing I learned was how much work would be involved just with this single story, everything having to be made or if I am lucky maybe kit-bashed and reworked for the purpose. Vast terrains, clothing, houses, plants, buildings, props, but with that comes a huge downside.
I have always wanted people to experience the same world that I do, to feel the same thrill that I do when these worlds come into being and crafting these lands and people has often been an excellent way of doing just that. However in the same sense, filling a world with images also limits what other people can experience, the way they will see and feel the worlds I craft, so a decision had to be made.
I always reminded myself that if I ever hit the point where one aspect began to hold back to the other then I would make a decision to remove the element that would hold one back. Rather than filling a book with images, instead I have opted that I will drop the volume of them, possibly removing them entirely and just creating the front and back covers for the respective stories to give readers the mental space to experience and see my worlds in their own mind.
To accomplish this task takes much more time as I am looking to create industry standard images, not good amateur work. This is no longer merely about software but about a lever of depth of thought given to every image that potentially will be used, I ran a few trials of working this way during the past six months and in truth it suits me far better than what I have done before so for me that now is what I will be doing.
Additionally however I have been working on the sequel to Life Downside Up, but I arrived at a pivotal and unfortunate moment with that too. The more I started to try crafting the actual story, the more I realised that, while the pieces are very good, they don't form up to become a complete story, or at least not the kind of story I wish to tell.
Again I had to make a decision and when I boiled it all down, as much as I love Islands, Evelyn, Fae, Savena and Ljianstipol, if Islands isn't really a story in a complete sense, then the time has come to lay them all to rest. I am sure you can imagine that deciding to set down my first characters and starting point of my journey into the unknown has been pretty hard, mentally I still haven't fully adjusted to the idea of that.
However, of course I have quite a lot of pieces for Islands kicking around and I'm not one for wasting something and while they don't quite form up to be a complete story, they do form up to be more like a series and that gave me an idea. Rather than simply binning nearly a years worth of work, I will just put them out, in some kind of order, hopefully people will like them or maybe it's just a way to keep something alive? I don't know, but it feels like the right thing to do.
Hopefully this makes some kind of sense, I'm not sure if I just rambled aimlessly or not but it feels right to let you know.