Instead of my annual review of the year that’s been, I thought I would post a sneaky peek at what is on the horizon. The plan is as scary as it is exciting…

Some of you may be aware that I have spent most of the last 12 months working on music and writing songs (which goes quite a long way to explaining why there is no art retrospective this year). I will (I promise) be getting back to the painting but, for now, I’m perfectly happy exploring the rabbit hole that I’ve jumped down.

I am planning a sister site to The Art Cave where I will keep track, so to speak, of the music side of things. There will also be music videos ~ which I have just started to learn how to create and edit ~ and I will be sharing the behind-the-scenes arty side of all of that here, using stills from the videos and also, eventually, album cover art too. It really is a special kind of happy place to be putting some of my songs together with some of the art I’ve created over the years.

One of the video edits looked so surprisingly good that we plan to use a still frame as a promo image (above). It’s a combination of not-especially-good-quality video footage taken on a phone which I edited in Blender (and not in Affinity Photo or Adobe Photoshop as one might expect) with my 2012 ‘Sun Shadow’ artwork in the background. But more about that later… I’m getting a little ahead of myself.

Hands up anyone who has heard of Blender? I discovered it while looking for software to create a simple art animation that could be projected onto a wall. While Blender certainly can do things like that, it’s really a bit like using artist-quality oils to paint the side of a house ~ you can but why would you? Blender is a free, open-source 3D computer graphics software suite used in creating animated films, visual effects, art, computer games etc. It is not an easy application to learn. It is not intuitive. My previous experience with graphic design software did not help much at all (my oldest digital art files are dated 1/1/1970 but I suspect that should actually be 1999). Even though Blender suffers from ‘design by committee’ making it, at times, unnecessarily complicated, it is still absolutely fantastic and I am slowly, slowly finding my way around it.

Fortunately there are a lot of resources available for anyone wanting to teach themselves Blender. In fact there are so many, it’s hard to know where to begin. My research took me to a lot of different YouTube channels as I searched for something appropriate for an absolute beginner. The first tutorial I tried was Blender Guru’s famous donut tutorial but I found it frustrating because although it was teaching me some of what the software was about, it wasn’t teaching me what I was most wanting to know right now. So I tried a different approach and searched for cool-looking video tutorials that were not necessarily just for beginners…

The still from my first completed animation may not look like much (you’ll have to wait for the official music video to see my version in action update: you can now view this animation on my newly created Moving Pictures page) but as far as I’m concerned, it really is quite something. It moves. It glows. And it is a continuous loop. Check out the Blender Daily tutorial for more info.

My second animation tutorial was even more fun than the first. Again, you’ll have to wait for the release of the music video to see my version you can view this animation on my new Moving Pictures page as well as checking out the original Ducky 3D tutorial to find out about the process and how good it looks in action.

There are also a surprising number of free, quality videos available online for commercial use ~ but I feel like that is a whole ‘nother chapter which I will save for another day. Stay tuned and I will be posting updates on my music journey as well as any paintings which may happen during the meanwhile.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I did return to and eventually complete the 16-part donut tutorial and I learnt a lot. Thank you Andrew Price a.k.a. Blender Guru.