A slight distraction - June 2024

This month I started playing Fortnite: LEGO. It has been a lot of fun, but also quite distracting on the weekends.

I have not yet made significant progress with my art tutorial series. The next lesson is about Composition, and I suspect I am at least 2 full days of work away from completion. On the positive side, I have holiday leave planned for July, so I could make more progress with Composition and the remaining lessons.

In terms of traffic to my website and my efforts on social media...I've been banned from one of the art subreddits I frequently visited. I suppose in hindsight the moderators would obviously not like me linking to my art tutorial series as much as I did. Surprisingly, even after I stopped sharing the link to my blog posts on Reddit, I have seen some traffic to my blog posts once in a while. Since almost nobody accepts my cookies in my cookie banner, I have no information about the people coming to visit my blog posts. Wix gives me the number of visitors to my various blog posts per day, and a break down by the time of day. I have no idea where my visitors are from, or how they reached my website.

On a more positive side, I made more than the usual 4 paintings this month, this time I made 5.

236. Desperation

I am continuing to experiment and learn how to paint movement. The painting above is based on a scene from one of the Star Wars: The Old Republic game trailers. In the reference scene, the two warriors are fighting in a dimly lit temple, and the middle of the scene showcases a hole in the wall of the temple, allowing light in and allowing us to see the city outside. I wanted to make my own spin on this composition, so instead, the center is a dark monolith, and we see the city in the background on the sides of the painting. Compositionally I think it works well, because the bright magic attacks at the center of the scene contrast better with the dark monolith in the background.

In terms of story planning, I aimed to write 3000 words this month. I wrote 3394 words, including 2 new story ideas. One was inspired by a music group I watched on YouTube, the other by another epic dream that I experienced while asleep.