Artistic Inspiration

What are your sources of inspiration? Why?

Apologies for the lack of a post yesterday. I spent Wednesday evening through today (so far) with my dad as he was getting some surgery and I just didn’t have the mental faculties necessary for most of my usual daily habits.

So, for today’s prompt I decided to pull from the official DayOne app website where they have a post for Journal Prompts. As I was scanning through I ended up on the Inspiration section and decided to combine a couple prompts, but I wanted to focus specifically on the artistic side of inspiration.

When it comes to painting miniatures I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from several mini painters that I’ve discovered on Instagram over the last few years. I see the different styles and techniques that they showcase, thinking about how easy they make it look, and I feel like I want to give them a try myself. Obviously, those styles and techniques of theirs have been honed over years of practice, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try them out to see where I might shine or need more practice. I’ve been good about not being discouraged when I don’t “instantly master” what I’m trying to imitate because I remind myself of these facts, but it also spurs me on to watch them again and again, to repeatedly dissect what I’m watching in different ways to see what I can glean.

In recent months I’ve taken to more general creative hobby crafting through the YouTube channel Nerdforge and the mind blowing things that they create. I find it not just inspirational but also refreshing when a wild new video is uploaded to their channel and it turns out to be something incredible like the full sized Warhammer “mini” they made. The ideas that get pulled together from different sources to create the final result is absolutely amazing and stretches the way my mind thinks about how to approach different situations with techniques that may not have been originally intended for the scale they were working on.

That’s where I’ve been getting a lot of my artistic inspiration these days, and as long as I keep watching these amazing people work, I believe I’ll always be able to find inspiration.

Another day, another story

Daily writing prompt
What have you been working on?

The last time I answered this prompt I was working on a different fantasy-themed story (which, I am definitely still working on since I put so much effort into it initially back during NaNoWriMo 2023) but lately I’m also picking at a new one that I want to eventually put up on Wattpad for the fun of it to see what kind response it gets.

I’m also working on more miniature painting and 3D printing stuff. On the miniature side, I’m still slowly working through my back log of minis from the game Black Rose Wars, and I’m also working on assembling the pieces for a box kit of Warhammer 40k: Necromunda that my dad bought because he wanted to play it after seeing some guys playing in a game shop. On the 3D printing side of the hobby house, I’ve been dabbling in Blender again to try and make a box/base that my printed “arborial dragon” can be mounted on. The box is also supposed to house some battery packs and other electronics parts so that I can make the dragon light up, and I’ve made/printed multiple prototypes but something is always off. (Word to the wise for those wanting to get into this stuff, there are all kinds of nuances to the process from designing in Blender to understanding how things will print in a resin-based printer.)

I think those are the main things I’m working on at the moment. Really it’s just more of the same from last time. The fun never ends!