photo of a kitten taking a cat nap

I’m taking a little time to get my house (and garden) in order. Literally. My Etsy art shop will be staying open (although I will be on holiday for a couple of weeks later this month). I’ll be back before you know it.

A Happy 10th Annaversary post (NOT a retrospective)

a colourful, stylised photo of Anna and The Husband

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.

*[Update: instead of having separate websites for art and music, I have decided to simplify things and keep them both on this website ~ so say “goodbye” to ‘The Art Cave’ and “hello” to ‘Anna Cull ~ Art & Music’.]

colourful, stylised photograph-art of Anna and The Husband
A promo image for ‘Anna and The Husband’ ~ don’t look for us just yet (we are, ourselves, still a WIP)

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…

Abstract Loop #1 is my first Blender animation ~ my thanks to Nik Kottmann for his tutorial (link below)

You can view all three of these animations on my newly created Moving Pictures page. Check out the Blender Daily tutorial for more info about this particular animated loop.

Organic SciFi Loop #1 is my second Blender animation ~ my thanks to Nathan Duck for his tutorial (link below)

My second animation tutorial was even more fun than the first. Visit the original Ducky 3D tutorial to find out about the process of making this organic sci-fi loop.

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.

A change as good as a holiday

Okay, this particular change is probably nowhere near as good as a holiday, but I have just changed my WordPress theme and moved things around a bit. You may not notice any difference if you’re only viewing my posts in the WordPress Reader, but it looks much fresher on my website…

The Art Cave ~ homepage screenshot

My new theme is Sketch, a responsive portfolio theme that is perfect for showcasing art and design projects. It took a lot of trial and error to get my portfolio page looking like the demo but I got there in the end. I had been using the same theme since March 2012 ~ so, yes, definitely time for a change : )

Happy 6th Annaversary

* Artist in Residence * digital collage created on Polyvore

“Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting.” Keith Haring

My WordPress blog turns six today! Not that I’ve been on WordPress much this year. Life continues away from my little blog but I do miss it. No excuses — I’ve simply been elsewhere doing other things — but I couldn’t let the anniversary slide by without acknowledging it. Six years!

Quite a lot has been going on… I just don’t have much to ‘show’ for it. Yet. Ever the optimist : )

I am still surrounded by art and making art, although it tends to be mostly digital these days, and I will be taking a few of my paintings of the non-digital variety along to the Christchurch Art Show again this year. Not much else to report, really. But it is good to be back here in WordPressLand. Maybe I’ll get back into this blogging thing again. Maybe…