Moving on from Open Casket... Decompression Sickness

 I think Open Casket and the animation are as 'done' as I can get them now. I think I'll called the sculpture "Gone" and the animation "All these moments" - a reference to the line from Bladerunner "All these moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain". Tomorrow I bring the animation to CSM. On Thursday my sculpture is delivered. I'm really looking forward to helping with the show install.

As is often the way after finishing a "big piece", I feel weirdly lost. I guess it's like that when you finishing any sort of big project - you are used to all that focus and pressure, and suddenly it's removed. I used to call the weird listless lost feeling, "decompression sickness".

I have a few ideas for things I want to do physically, but they will have to wait for my sculpture to be removed, as it currently takes up all the space in the dining room that I use for making. Once that's gone, I have a bunch of projects I started and did't finish that I want to return to, and once the sculpture returns, I have the fun of deciding what I am going to do with it - currently either turning it into some sort of wall mounted cast, or perhaps using it as a mould to cast a concrete 'positive' of my body that I could install in the garden somewhere. My poor house...

I am more stuck on the digital side - I've always kept the two things quite separate. I'm still setting up my new laptop as I had quite a lot of 'fiddly' software that takes a while to re-install e.g. OpenVDB is not just a case of 'clicking install' - you have to download a bunch of dependancies, and the compile it from source - which is gloriously fast on my new laptop compared to my old one! Once I've done that, I might make a Volume based rendering of my Open Casket water. There's a bunch of other things I want to do with Volumes as I find the look of how they are rendered quite interesting... 

But probably the thing I should REALLY do is to get the 3d printer going! I think that's what I'm really excited about - there are a couple of projects I REALLY want to do - one is scanning a river bank and making a model from it, the other is making plaster underground buildings - both will make more sense when I do them!

And I guess I will keep this blog alive, at least for now. I don't know if it helps me with no obvious readership, but it feels sad to just stop....