It’s weird being an artist

When I was on the most western point of Ireland, the locals had trouble pronouncing or even remembering my name, so for the week I was there I was Bob. And to quote NoMeansNo: It’s weird being a Bob.

A colleague of mine, another Art Professor, asked me where I learned to become an Artist. For she did see me as one, meaning I think like an artist. But I did not go to Art School proper. I tried to relate my journey but could not really explain it. I don’t think I learned to be an Artist. I may be an artist despite my schooling as a filmmaker. I have always felt the need to create, and express myself. Not in words, but visually.

Can one learn to be an artist? You can learn the tools and techniques of creating Art. You can study Art History and build a solid foundation for you artistic practice. But can you learn to have this innate drive to create?

Bob the Artist does not know, but feels it is not so. Is this urge to create innately human, does everybody have it in them? Is there an Artist inside every person, waiting to be unlocked? That would be weird.

Blender Week 2

Live happened, so with a month delay, here is work from Blender Week 2. We did not get to a third week. I did finish a VR project I had been working on for years, but that is a different story.

Of course, all of you who follow me on Mastodon or Instagram have seen these videos already
 

I started the week epxloring the scuplting tools, which are pretty intuitive and work well. Not quite ZBrush, but that progranm has such an awkward interface that you need to regularly use it to be good at it. Like editing on and AVID system, which you could not even do without a custom keyboard with color coded keys - it has been a while since I actually used AVID so I do not know if this is still the case.

I uploaded the video in a square format to Youtube and that turned it into a short without asking. Bad YouTube.
 

On day two I took the one eyed character thing into Unreal. Took a lot of trial and error, and two days, but it walks. It does sink further into the ground after a few steps. That I had never user Unreal before did not help.
 

For day four I decided to do someting fun again. I took the sculted head from day one of this week, and pushed it through a pinboard. Not a real pin board, the pins are just cubes placed in a dense grid using Blender Geometery nodes. I was curious to see how many cubes it could handle. This was on a relatively new silicon Macbook Pro. Not disappointed.
 

For the last day I decided to play with dynamic simulation. Or day and a half, as it took a while to render. I basically did someting I used to assign my students: build a Rube Goldberg machine. I found the rigid body dynamics easy to use and pretty robust. I did not get it to interact with cloth or other soft body dynamics, and am not sure you can.

Then life happened and I did not return to Blender for the rest of the summeer.