Update

Hi all, sorry I've been quiet this month after so much activity last month. TBH, it's been a very stressful month with a number of major turmoils both professional and personal to deal with that have been building to a climax all culminating this month. Personally, I dislike "look at my sad life" posts on youtube because I think they're a downer, but I just thought I'd explain a little about why it matters with regards to my work, and why there is a long term positive aspect.

When things are stressful, it completely drains my creativity. Imagine how it would affect your ability to write a love song if your mom died or you lost your job. Neither of these are (exactly) the case, but you get the point. When my creative energy is at low ebb, I tend to switch to administrative tasks, which draw upon a different part of my brain that is not mood dependent. Indeed (top tip) when I am feeling shitty, organising or tidying stuff is a very therapeutic way to deal with it, and stop the mood sliding too much. These are tasks that I would not normally get around to because I'm having too much fun creating, but I have to pay attention to both aspects.

As a result, I have continued to work on my human skin textures, and now have a collection of 13 fibre eyebrows to use in future art. It probably sounds like a small thing, but until recently, all of my models included eyebrows baked into the textures. This was fine until you got closer, or turned to an angle, then it became obvious. As a result, I have now remastered maybe a dozen facial skin textures to remove the baked brows, then remastered all of my stock models so that they now have fibre eyebrows rather than baked in ones.

I have also been remastering some older, much loved characters, continuing to work on improving my lighting skills, and will spend the next few days building a catalogue of new eye textures for close up faces. At the moment, I tend to choose from half a dozen eye textures, but I hope to broaden that, as well as creating some of those amazing piercing blue with dark halo eyes that are so striking!

My interdimensional story is now being serialised on a major web site, so I really need to get back on that to take  it further.

Happy ending, all of the issues that were bringing me down resolved themselves positively over the course of a few days, and I received a small but not insignificant cash infusion to help my finances over christmas so I am now looking forwards to the future quite positively. It may take a few days or more for the creative juices to get flowing, but I think we are in a better place for the future. It excites me so much when I learn new things about how to improve my 3D work, and I'm already starting to feel the enthusiasm return.

Thank you all for your patience and support!

Now I'm off to watch the 1980 version of The Fog for the 500th time!