#13.7.2020

Date: 13 July 2020

Duration: 52 minutes at 10:28 pm

Depth:

There are these moments when I meditate these days when I experience awful little ! There isn’t much happening. It is bright with clarity. And a positive place. It feels good to experience these moments.

There sure is some change happening right now to my meditation. The shakings are still very much there but they are the least of my concerns. Every once in a while I experience stillness of breath. These perfectly still moments followed by a moving breath with shakes.

July 13, 2020 - Day 24

I’m currently attending an art therapy group. We meet once a week and do arty things. In-between sessions we thought that, as a group, it may be fun to do regular doodles with prompts. We spun a random word selector and received the word ‘alabaster’; a type of soapstone-y, translucent material. There’s something ephemeral and time-locked about this material to me. Upon recieving the prompt I had an image appear in my mind of some vast, polished, white, futuristic thoroughfare leading towards an enormous, abstract structure made of the stuff - a street lined with collumns through which glaring sunlight streams. Some minimalist, open space from some far off future on a distant world. I did an utterly terrible initial sketch in order to capture what I mean:

The image in my mind very much reminded me of the brutalist style from the game Control, as well as some dystopian renders that I’ve come across in the past. I went to find some images to use as references along with the original material itself. Screenshots from the game Control:

Rendering references:

Alabaster material references, note the translucent and quartz-like qualities:

Before finalising the piece as a poster and uploading it there was one final task to do: ‘compositing’. The compositing part of the process can be used to do a ‘final pass’ by hand in order to add more detail. I generally use Photoshop during this stage. I simply masked out areas of the image that I felt needed a little more work,

Imported the textures that I wished to use:

Twisted them into shape:

Blended them into the image:

and then masked them out using the masks from earlier:

Lastly, I did a colour grading pass to bring out some of the qualities of the image that I wanted to see pop. Here’s a before and after for the compositing: