I haven’t been keeping this blog up to date much, was I? Looking back I can trace it to when I joined Wolfery. It satisfied my desire to write and create worlds so well that, for a few years, I never needed another outlet. I was in my element, creating realms and stories and I basked in the emotions of people discovering those places and coming to live in the stories I wrote.

I was watching the Secrets of Shading by Steven Zapata the other day and he mentioned a concept that really got stuck in my head: Everything that you put down into a drawing, you need to draw it and design it and give it as much thought as any other part of the drawing. Being a 3D artist, I never really paid that much attention to shadows. Shadows are there. It’s what you get for free. You can influence them with the light setup, but more often than not you just get back to the setups you already know. There’s a trusty rig for isometric dioramas, which I learned from Roman Klčo of Polygon Runway. There’s a few “standard” portrait setups that I picked up from the literature. I never really bothered to think why one light clicks with me better than the other, though, until Steven mentioned it in his video.

I grew up to be a very nervous person. I worry about what people think of me and how they perceive me. It reflects in my art, too. Whenever I make something even marginally successful, be it a story or a 3D sculpture, I am hesitant to start something new only because I’m afraid of a consequence of not meeting the expectations I’ve set with my prior piece. That’s so not healthy in a long run and I’m so happy I’m finally recognising myself being stuck in this pattern.

It really was a while since I last had a meaningful update to my blog, even though the early years of it were crucial to my development. After all, I kept it afloat since 2014; it’s ten years of Shinyuu. My emotions, my hopes, my dreams. Gradually, I shifted to journalling on paper, and the personal touch of the blog disappeared. I got into inks, and pens, and all the fancy stationery stuffs. I only held to it for maybe four years before losing interest. Again, my priorities shifted.