Dioramas (Patreon)

Hey patrons. I'll keep this simple. I've been making a few dioramas the past week and I wanted to share a couple here, as well as a little about the process I use to make them.

Often I find that I have ideas for things that I have no experience learning how to bring forth from the "ideal" into the "form". The ideas I have are not any one thing in particular - they're not visual, they're not musical, they're not stories to tell with words. The grammar with which I usually speak of these ideas is, of course, music, but with the development of PROJECTIONS I was forced to take on new skills that I had never considered and had no experience with. This gave me a bigger vocabulary to work with, as far as the "form" of art goes, and wholly new ways to structure things.

These dioramas I've been making are done in two parts. First I model and texture everything in blender, then I import those things into unity where I can assemble shaders, and code the behavior of the objects in the scene - not to mention writing the resulting images to files.

The development of Arana Sleeps brought me to a place of visual language that I really like. Since Arana Sleeps is a situation that isn't exactly reality (it's sort of a dream), the visual style I felt should vague, the way that dreams might feel sometimes after returning to the clarity of the waking world. I also like the idea that Arana Sleeps as a game is a weird machine which struggles, churns, and works very hard to unfold itself. The style ultimately presented itself organically as a combination of low quality textures, models, and blurry screen operations to obscure the strange world you explore.

Making these dioramas I feel the same sort of energy. I want them to feel smeared, broken, and more than a little distant. It's also fun practice using these skills.

It's been really wonderful exploring this kind of language for these expressions too. There are many ideas coming out of me that I had only previously been able to daydream about, rather than actually make. I cannot easily write a song, or tell a story, about some of these compositions. They must be expressed visually, and I think this format works really well.

Unfortunately, talking about them is kind of dry, but I hope you will enjoy these previews and a little information about how they're made. I have several more that I would like to share more openly, but I am still trying to come up with a way to actually share them.

I am no longer active on twitter and I only use the site to tell my followers to join my discord server or to let people know I have a bluesky account. Bluesky does not support gifs or mp4s, and I don't really use other art sites or social media sites to communicate at all, anywhere. I can always share these things in my discord server, but if any of you have suggestions about where I might post them, I'd love to know.

Meanwhile, I may end up posting them on twitter anyway, while also using that as a way to say "hey follow me somewhere else". We'll see. Anyway, thank you so much for reading, for looking, and for supporting me here on Patreon. I don't produce content like a machine, but I try and share what I do here with you guys as often as I can.

Have a pleasant day now! Goodbye! Goodbye!