Preface

This is roaming97 from the future; this was supposed to be finished 2.75 years ago. After an extensive rewrite of this article, it’s finally complete.

Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve left these humongous walls of text which describe in detail certain situation I am currently in for you to read, except this time is not something that’s happening but something that already happened.

I figured it’d be a good idea to finally talk about all of what has been going on behind the scenes, or rather, inside my mind on how in the world I even got the motivation to start this, and not only that, but keep going and achieve this objectively negligible but subjectively significant milestone. I thought it would be a good read for anybody that is interested in knowing the process and experiences throughout that period of time.

So buckle up, because this is going to be an extremely long read!

Compelled

Surely, the first question that will come to mind is along the words of: “What motivated you to begin this artistic journey? / How did you get the idea to start this?” and I would just throw an “I don’t know” like I usually do, but retrospectively, I think I know the answer for this.

2020 (excluding that event) was a pretty mundane year for me when it came to creating content for roaming97: two videos per year and not many posts outside of the usual retweet about any work I was involved in, 04 Collective releases for example. I had finally managed to form a clearer personal brand, and it was the year I could safely say I had left aside my more jokey side around my nickname which was something I was thinking of doing for 3 years at that point.

2021 arrived and I was determined to create more content than ever before, with 04 Collective’s closure I was pretty much “unemployed”, so that meant it was time to show my portfolio to potential clients. My portfolio needed some remodelling as well as an addition of new content, despite all the material that thankfully the label incidentally provided me with during its run. With that in mind, I entered an event that consisted of designing artwork or producing music in a span of 24 hours hosted by FORM, All Nighter Volume 6. I, of course, didn’t win the grand prize of being the face of the album by getting my artwork chosen for the cover, but I was nonetheless satisfied with the result.

Shortly after this I received a pretty long video commission which was a 30 minute video that I completed in a weekend, it was a music live set composed entirely of VJ loops, wasn’t as simple as I make it sound here.

Even with all of these intense crunches of designing, modelling, rendering, editing, and compositing back to back in the span of just a few days… I was left with a craving for taking on a similar challenge again, without waiting an entire year for the next iteration of the event to happen or the next blue moon for another client to ask for a commission, so just for the sake of it I fired up my creative software and made a piece in less than a day, JUICE. I thought the final result was good… but not good enough, so I posted another piece the next day, titled it JUST FINISH SOMETHING as I was already struggling with this sudden change of pace, remaining unsatisfied I’ve made another one the next day. And another one, and anoth- you know where this is going!

JUICE pic.twitter.com/wroJUf05Y5

— roaming97 (@roaming98) March 24, 2021

Every single day

I should probably mention this right off the bat: my everydays are transparently inspired by Beeple’s, even following a similar structure.

My everydays were divided into 4 seasons (barely distinct from Beeple’s “rounds”) composed of 96 days each, I didn’t know it would be serialized this way from day one, it was a last minute decision by day 97, the suffix to my nickname which was appropriately the title for that piece:

roaming97 pic.twitter.com/QrJg6u8gdd

— roaming97 (@roaming98) June 28, 2021

The layout for these was very simple although disorganized at first: have my nickname somewhere, the title of the artwork, the day number, its publication date, and the software I used to create that piece in particular in a comma-separated line of text.

“Am I gonna take a break on weekends?”, “What if I miss a day?”, and “What will I do if I have an emergency and I can’t be in front of my computer to post that day’s artwork?” are questions that emerged often with every passing day of this now routinely exercise. To ensure that I wasn’t going to lose interest in this by the third week, I gathered a huge amount of willpower from God knows where to just get through it. As long as I completed something every day, including weekends, I could rest at ease.

Despite these questions, I think the most recurring one was, What am I even gonna do today? I’m completely dry of ideas!

It’s no secret that one of the things keeping me from posting more constantly in any of my social media (Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo at the time) during the first years of this project was the world-infamous creative block when I considered four posts a year an overflowing amount of content. This series then served really well at training my mind on getting ideas out of thin air and learning to stop being so prideful about not taking references or using existing visual material as inspiration. Simultaneously, I was enriching my artistic toolbox with more plugins, addons, scripts, utilities, and even entire software to streamline the technical process so I could focus on the creative one as much as possible.

Adding the self-deprecating artist trope into the mix retrospectively, until then I’d never got to appreciate or even respect my own effort put into my work, either by a frail self-esteem or a disproportionate sense of perfectionism that in hindsight wasn’t really present with the exception of a handful of pieces made throughout the year-long marathon. Most of these felt like another chore to complete next to school assignments and commission work, but whenever inspiration truly struck, it was definitely something special.

I can confidently pinpoint the first instance of this to one morning in April 2021, originating day 33’s theme from a dream. I’ve been having these lucid dreams involving landscapes I could freely explore and remember for a short while after waking up. The idea of finally bringing one of them to life using these artworks as the catalyst was compelling.

Slightly unrelated note: dreams and their creative potential are concepts that I’d like to explore in a future project and give my own take on it, dismissing how overused the theme has been for decades at this point, I just think it’d be interesting to tackle.

A brief description of the dream: I am in the middle of a foggy desert with silver sand. I limited myself to only walking the seemingly endless terrain instead of using any of the available dream transportation methods like flying or teleporting, naturally for no reason like in most dreams. After what felt like hours of mindlessly stranding I arrived at what seemed like an oasis in the middle of it, not something I particularly needed as I never felt dehydrated but welcome nonetheless. This donut-shaped oasis is composed of mainly fertile soil with scattered patches of grass that grown from it, even a row of trees managed to grow and prosper in the middle of this dry landscape. A knee-deep small pond in perhaps where the cavity of this donut was located, the pseudo-meadow had just the right angle to sit facing the pond and look at the high noon sun reflect on it, alongside yourself if you got close enough. The feeling of comforting solitude was probably the last thing that bloomed in that oasis. I suddenly woke up because my phone’s alarm went off.

After this artwork and the first season in general, I got the hang of it. I had a somewhat stable workflow and became efficient at it, so far so good as long as nothing I had to care about popped up.

I was so confident that this series was going to last longer than a year.

Obstacle(s)

The variables that were involved turned out to be many more and much more significant than I expected (nothing unpredictable in hindsight), it wasn’t only the ideas and render times, but it was also what circumstances surrounded me at the time. For example if I was going to be out of town (which did happen a couple of times throughout the everydays, I had to create two pieces on a single day so I could upload the second one the next day via my phone), or whenever I was sick, I hadn’t consider those scenarios, or rather, didn’t put too much thought into them back when I began this marathon.

One of my main concerns evidently was time, there would be occasions when I would not be able to use a computer, let alone the software I’d use for creating these pieces of artwork. And what caused that time variable to shrink? Mainly school. I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming school like a foolish teenager “oh! skool sux!”, this is a series I was extremely passionate about, but I’d like to think I have well established priorities; school being a couple of steps above the everydays, alongside my commissioned work.

In addition to time, ideas were one of the biggest challenges. I know I mentioned this wasn’t as significant, since the main point of doing these everydays was to learn how to handle creative blocks for some of my bigger projects (which ironically I have not been able to finish because of the everydays, I’m well aware of that), but at some point this and the previous part of the equation would leave me with no time or ideas at all for a piece that day, which would result in extremely basic artwork that I was of course not happy with but wasn’t worth sacrificing the entire streak up to that point.

In fewer words, I was letting these constraints take control over the everydays most of the time, because they had a much larger weight in my life like school and work, it wasn’t really worth sacrificing those things just because I wanted to add extra detail to a single piece of daily artwork.

But even if I chose to let either school or work run on autopilot (which would’ve turned catastrophic quickly), there was still one major obstacle that was going to invariably add friction to the process of creating these pieces in a timely manner, and I think I’m not alone when I name it: perfectionism.

For a very long time I have been extremely sporadic when releasing any personal video-related content for (at the time) the last several years, not because I didn’t make anything, but because I’d have the trend of leaving them in an unfinished or in a perpetual on hold state where the video would be “complete” but I’d want to sit on it for a while then analyze it with a new pair of eyes, unfortunately not returning after the first break.

I had a project that was pretty elaborate that was scheduled to be released on December 31st, 2019 but was unfinished. I had a project that was pretty elaborate that was scheduled to be released on December 31st, 2020 but was scrapped. I had a project that was pretty elaborate that was scheduled to be released on December 31st, 2021. I posted it, kept it public for an hour, but then deleted it because I wanted to add some more detail and scenes which I never ended up adding.

I am not going to describe what each project was in case I someday wish to revisit any of them. I would not consider this an obstacle but a problem, a problem I feel I was able to mitigate for the most part.

A problem that I also had a rough time mitigating has been the tools themselves!

Painware

For this section I am going to ask for your patience, I will take my sweet time to rant a lot here but hopefully it’s not too far of a tangent.

I used to have Adobe Photoshop as my primary image editing tool which I used for editing, compositing, and final details of my artwork. This was the case until around season two when I just got sick of all of its performance problems, which is definitely something that I’ve seen a lot of folks complain about already. It was a giant pile of annoyances that slowly and steadily built itself up, not since I’ve started making the everydays, I’m talking since I’ve started using Photoshop or Adobe software at all back in 2012-2013.

9-10 years of pure stress and frustration finally detonating during the everydays.

This experience is identical to my time using Adobe Flash (currently Animate), I had stuck with Macromedia Flash 8 for a very long time before switching to Flash CS6 in 2015 then switching back to it in 2017. Yeah, that’s it, I thought it would be a good time to share that.

I wouldn’t ever finish this text if I was to list every single complaint that I have with the software published by this company, regardless of the company itself. There’s already dozens of people giving their… insight (to put it nicely) on Adobe as a company, no need for my input there.

Adobe Photoshop might come with the latest and greatest bells and whistles, but these features didn’t mean anything to me if I couldn’t use them without Photoshop crashing every ten minutes. It might’ve been my computer at the time, or rather, at multiple intervals of time every new update came out. I mean, after a couple of versions, I should’ve gotten used to having my specs be completely obsolete by the next major version of the program, but by every single tiny bugfix update? Not only that, there would be times when they would change keyboard shortcuts for no reason, and one time they even changed completely how some color spaces worked for no reason, every new image I would create would have a cooler color temperature by default.

Day 140, ”software problems”. That one day Photoshop had corrupted the artwork I had been trying to create that day three times. I was done with Adobe software, after so many years worth of problems I decided it was time to finally migrate to other software.

software problems pic.twitter.com/9KxrcptO03

— roaming97 (@roaming98) August 11, 2021

And thus, my search for alternatives started.

I was pretty lax with what I was looking for with the program I was going to choose: just don’t crash. I started out with free/open source software since that one was the easiest to try out. I kept getting that one program in my results when searching for ‘photoshop alternative’ so I gave it a try. Suffice to say it was nowhere near a replacement for my tool of choice. There were others like Paint.NET, Corel PaintShop, or Photopea, but none of them convinced me fully.

In the end, I stuck with this Photoshop alternative I kept seeing people talk about at the time, Affinity Photo.

Cheaper, no subscription model, better stability, and overall the perfect replacement for Photoshop. It may not have the “cutting edge” features that its Adobe counterpart had, but I am willing to accept the tradeoff if it means I will not have to deal with crashes every few minutes again.

2024 update: Man, do I not miss Photoshop with all the AI garbage that has been funneled into the program for the past year or two.

As for my main 3D software, it has always been Blender, started out in 2.7 when its learning curve was still steep as it heavily relied on keyboard shortcuts. Right-click select and all that.

I experimented a bit using Maya only because of its “industry standard” factor, and because I was being “taught” that software at the time in school, but unfortunately I couldn’t warm up to it after trying it several times. In fact, I think Blender was my main software of choice for all my artwork period. But why Blender exactly?

Streamlined

During most of the course of these 365 days, the ideas I had in mind always went through a filter to match my current workflow unless I felt adventurous that day or had some extra time to spare. My scenes always consisted of mostly 3D scenes with inanimate props and objects made in Blender then composited using other software like Photoshop/Affinity Photo and Python scripts later on to automate things like watermark placing.

Rarely did I dare to get out of my usual lane to experiment with new styles or techniques. I guess at the time I was being influenced by my commissioned work which utilized a similar toolchain to the one I used for my personal work so I couldn’t risk getting rusty at my familiar tools in the scenario where I had to finish a commission and work on that day’s artwork simultaneously, which did end up happening several times throughout.

In a way one could say I was playing it very safe in order to maintain consistency with my work at the time, I don’t completely regret it but I kept thinking about some everyday ideas that I couldn’t execute because they would require too much time or work to get right calling back to the perfectionism issue I had. I couldn’t let anyone see me seriously attempt something like drawing and make it seem clear that I sucked at it! That mindset was intoxicating and it precedes the everydays, maybe thanks to them I gained the courage to take some small steps towards the practice of occasionally derailing my art completely into uncharted territory.

Something I also learned to do was to sketch/write an idea as soon as it sparked in my head, I’ll someday show the full list of sketches I’ve made for some everydays. I would sketch an idea and wouldn’t actually work on it until a day, a week, or a month later. The point was to leave my ideas on paper before I forgot, I had never realized how many of those ideas had the potential to become something really good if I put the work into them but didn’t bother writing them down.

If there’s something that you could take away from this: no matter how insignificant the idea might seem at first, write it down, sketch it, materialize it in some shape or form. You can always work with it based on that initial thought to transform it into something more solid, analyze it, make sense of it, you’ll be surprised at how much you can get out of them.

Elixir

I’d like to very briefly reflect a bit on what was the value this experience had for me as a designer, as a student, as a freelancer, but most importantly an artist.

Some of the things I learned from all of this were:

• It’s okay to pull the “good enough” on a piece you’ve spent enough time on.
• Write or sketch your damn ideas, you never know if they’ll bloom into something greater than you thought.
• Try to draw the line between being critical about your work and self-deprecation.

All of these points sound cliché in hindsight, but I think it’s important I went through the challenge of learning each one of them gradually, as they’ve helped me find places to improve and stop looking in places I’m already skilled at and apply those lessons to my work in general, especially with my upcoming plans. As a way to enforce the last bullet point, I (maybe selfishly so) decided to give myself badges every time I met a particular milestone, it’s a small thing but it helps.

There is so much more I could share about the process and insight on this first streak, but I’ll let my work speak for itself from this point onwards.

Thank you for taking the time to read this entire article! It took a huge amount of time to be completed, reasons already stated. While I don’t discard repeating this challenge sometime in the future I might take a drastically different approach and structure. Besides, I already have a lot of new projects I’m working on and hopefully finishing, all owed to the experiences gathered in this humble exercise in consistency and creativity.

They won’t be called ‘Twovrydays’ next time.