It's early to think about what form this project is ultimately going to take, if any, over the long run. (Because, you know, life. It happens.) That said, I think about that long run, a lot, without trying to commit to any specific decisions. Right now, where I'm at, this piece I'm working on now, it's essentially prologue material, or, from a less optimistic point of view, a proof of concept or test run for the "real" version that comes later. But I don't like thinking this isn't real, because perfect is the enemy of done and all that, certain well-acknowledged life-cycles of attitudes toward's one's passion projects; that "Best thing ever!" to "Worst thing ever!" to "Screw it, it's done, what's next!" cycle that everybody experiences over the time they spend progressing on anything that takes more than a day or two to complete. So really, whatever this piece is when it's done, it'll be done, and then what comes next will be what comes next, whatever the final relationship it'll have to this piece that came before it in time. I'm very conscious of how much there is left to learn about Blender, which is the primary art program I'm using to create this project; I can safely say I've done more than skim the surface at this point, having spent the last six months doing things with the program; maybe I've rolled up my sleeves and even gotten my forearms a little wet, but, there's still, undoubtedly, deep-sea level exploration yet to be attempted. Some of it is just a matter of time, some of it is a matter of need. Even with what I've learned so far I've probably only actually used a fraction of that in service of the story and style I'm looking to produce. There's things I'll do apart from this project for the sake of doing those things that'll undoubtedly feed back into the project in time. The program itself can be very suggestive and has produced a sort of man-machine synergy or hand-to-tool connection that's the closest I've felt yet to an enabling expressiveness; the images in my head that burn to get out start to flow more easily through my connection to this program than they have through cameras and Photoshop, paints and canvases, or, even, words and word processors. And I've yet to fully grasp what there is left that should be done and what doing those things is going to further suggest and imply what can be done or what might be done. And then on top of all that is just the extra layer of learning more about art and design and composition and on and on which itself is a water world containing oceans containing worm holes to other universes. Things, in short, get deep. All of which means that what comes next might look exactly like what's come before, but, chances are, it won't; but I know that what I'm producing right now is what I can produce right now and that producing this right now is better than waiting until I can see what I might be able to produce later, in some more idealized future, when I've learned everything there is to learn and I'm ready to just drop genius like a hammer onto an exposed toe. All that said there's certain things I can do to help the next bit feel like a more unified whole, as large and as ongoing as it might be, while still leaving room for expressiveness and flexibility and new discoveries; it's just that one of those things involves following up this run with a rather mammoth scripting and planning phase which, in my limited experience with graphic novel-type projects, seems to be the thing that I don't necessarily suck the most at but is the thing that most feels like drawing blood from stones. Like all skills, though, I can get better at it, if I just, you know, do it, a lot more. Which. Well. Again. The patronage system would help, here. Long-winded way of saying that things are heating up and then they might seem to cool back down for a long time and then maybe again they'll heat up, way back up, way past what temperatures I thought the thermometer could measure. Maybe.
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