Lately I have been working with colorful inks, which has been fun and relaxing!
I decided to tackle the tough angle of a cat stretching on the ground. I think I sort of got it! This cat looks like he is stretching/flying through space, which I think works.
This blog goes a bit deeper into the inks I am using lately. And here is a cool video of some ink art!
Dots of colorful ink on watercolor paper
What I am reading/watching/playing right now:
I wanted to make an oil painting of the first image you see in the island of Myst (this is one of a couple Myst paintings I've made in the past few years)
As I have been procrastinating on reaching the end of Final Fantasy 9 on iOS, I decided to download RealMyst onto my iPad Pro. I haven't played Myst since I was about 12 years old (Thanks for buying me Myst at the computer store, mom!!) I loved Myst so much as a kid that I even read the Myst book series.
I wasn't the greatest at playing Myst, and I think I only got to the second world after straining to find how to do so for several months of after-school play sessions.
RealMyst is like Myst, but with more textures!
Both then and now, I enjoyed sitting in the star chair of the first island and entering random dates just to see what patterns would appear. It almost doesn't matter to me if the stars are supposed to be a clue, I just like playing with the star chair.
Some people never change, I guess! My personal character flaw with puzzle games is: I get too excited about easter eggs and small non-puzzle related things. My ability to find useless elements of puzzle games is near uncanny. If you ever do an Escape Room with me, I will solve almost nothing, and I will find every prop that is not relevant to succeeding and fawn over it until the time runs out.
In the original Myst, I loved watching the animation in the courtyard where yellow butterflies would slowly come toward you - I think it happened on the screen depicted above. As a kid, I could not really figure out what triggered the butterflies... but ever since then, I have become emotionally attached to butterflies in video games, such as the butterflies in Ocarina of Time and Elder Scrolls. They don't really ever do anything, but I am always happy they are there.
Books with clue pages, strange videos, switches, props... all of these clue-and-trigger elements make the island of Myst into an incredibly calculated, yet beautiful, space. There is no easily-explainable premise to Myst - there is just an island and you're on the island and that is basically it. The game serves up just the right amount of absurdity and story, and meaning to be art.