TL;DR: I wanted to continue but for various reasons that won’t be possible, back to the two posts per year schedule.
This is roaming97 from the future, this was supposed to be finished 2.5 years ago.
Hello! It’s been a while since I’ve left these humongous walls of text which describe with a lot of detail certain situation I am currently in for you to read.
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 barely significant milestone, I thought it would be a good read for anybody that is interested, which I highly doubt, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt, one never knows.
So buckle up, because this is going to be an extremely long read!
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 answer with an “I don’t even know” like I usually do but thinking retrospectively, I actually do know this time.
2020 (excluding the obvious fact about that year that goes completely without saying) was a pretty standard 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 a commission I did for someone, 04 Collective releases and whatnot. I had finally managed to establish an original logo and it was the year I can say I could exclude my more jokey side from the project which was something I had been trying to do for 3 years at that point and finally give it a more professional image.
2021 arrived and I was determined to create more content than ever before, 04 Collective closed so I was pretty much “unemployed”, so that meant I had to also create portfolio material to show to clients, I felt like the current content in my website back then was still lackluster. So with that, I entered an event that consisted of doing a piece of music or visual art within 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 cover, but I was happy with the result nonetheless.
That left me with that drive of wanting to try the challenge once again, so I did just that after finishing a huge commission that coincidentally was also made in an extremely short period of time, a 30 minute video within a weekend. I made a quick artwork titled JUICE on March 24th, 2021, exactly one year before I started writing this huge chunk of text! After that artwork was made I was happy I could pull off that in the same time frame as that one event I participated in. It was good… but not good enough. This is how it begins, ladies and gentlemen!
I should probably mention this right off the bat: my everydays are clearly inspired by Beeple’s; but it’s not like he is the copyright owner of something so ambiguous as making, finishing, and posting a piece of artwork every day so I would not necessarily call mine a direct ripoff.
This series was divided into 4 seasons, 96 days each, I didn’t know I was going to follow this pattern from the very beginning, but I felt like it was the right thing to do when day 97 arrived, switching to a new layout. The layout for these is very simple: have my nickname somewhere, the title of the artwork, the current day, the current date, and the software I used to create that piece in particular.
One of the reasons that mainly stopped me from making content in the past was the dreaded by almost every artist creative block, making me only post four times a year at most since 2018; Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo being pretty much the only places I did. The more daily artwork, the closest I was to realize that was actually helping me as a way to exercise my mind by forcing it to make artwork every day of the week, no Sunday breaks or anything. It started out simple enough with some landscapes and abstract stuff made in renders with Blender 2.92 and Photoshop, which turned out to be the usual software I used for almost all of the first season of these.
Something that I probably don’t mention often but it might be obvious especially for those who have followed me before 2020: I didn’t like my own work. Call it perfectionism/pessimism, but that used to be the way I saw my own work, and I think thanks to these that sort of changed. For good.
Around late April 2021, I had this one dream about a landscape where I’d really like to be at if it existed. This definitely wasn’t the first time it happens, I’ve been having these lucid dreams about landscapes ever since I can remember, but the everydays were a perfect catalyst to finally bring one of those ideas to life, as I had to do it quickly while still keeping some quality to it. Thus, day 33 happened, and something happened that up until then hadn’t ever happened before in the almost 5 years (at the time) I had been doing art and video stuff: I actually liked something I’d made. This of course doesn’t sound like too much when written like that, but it definitely meant a lot to myself, the fact that I could finally create something that I was happy with, it was truly special.
After the first season, I got the hang of it. I knew what to usually do, the thought process, the software, techniques, etc. Well, those were the only factors that I thought were involved during the creation of these pieces.
I also thought this series was going to last longer than a year.
The variables that were involved of course turned out to be many more and much more significant than I expected, it wasn’t only the ideas and render times, but it was also what circumstances surrounded me, for example if I was going to be out of town (which did happen while the everydays were happening, I had to create two pieces on a single day so I could upload the second one the next day through my phone), or I was sick and whatnot, I didn’t consider those possibilities, or rather, didn’t put too much thought to them when I started the series.
One of the main concerns evidently was time, there would be occasions when I would not be able to use a computer, let alone the creative software I usually utilize for 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 an angry teen “oh! skool sukz!”, this is a series I am extremely passionate about, but I’d like to think I have well established priorities; school being a couple of steps above the everydays, along with my commissioned work.
In addition to time it was ideas one of the variables at play. I know I mentioned this wasn’t as major of a reason, 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, conscious choice), 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 everyday streak up until that point.
In a fewer words, I was letting these variables take control over the everydays most of the time, because they were usually for more important stuff like school, work, it wasn’t really worth sacrificing those things just because I wanted to add extra detail to a single piece of artwork.
Mainly, the reason I gave this section the name it has is because I could’ve discarded these variables if I didn’t have other responsibilities in my life, really everything could boil down to one simple thing, and I’m think I’m not alone when talking about it: perfectionism.
At this point the only reason why I hadn’t released anything video related that’s mildly elaborated in the last couple years is beacause… I didn’t finish them or plain dropped those projects because I didn’t like how they looked, resulting in them being either canned or in standby indefinitely. Keep in mind, these videos were in the making way before I started the everydays, I have one project that I was looking to release on December 31st, 2019, another one that I was looking to release on December 31st, 2020, another one on December 31st, 2021, you get the pattern.
I am not going to go in too much detail on what each project was in case I someday decide to finish any of them, I would not consider this an obstacle but a problem, a problem I feel I can solve now, but I want to share a couple more thoughts before getting there, hang on.
For this section I am going to request your patience, I will take my time to complain a lot here but hopefully it will tie up properly at the end.
I used Adobe Photoshop for image editing and general compositing of the final 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 problems that kept slowly piling 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 blowing up during the everydays.
This is exactly what happened with me and Adobe Flash, I stuck with Macromedia Flash 8 for the longest time before switching to Flash CS6 in 2015 then switching back to it in 2017, figured this would be a good time to share this fact.
I wouldn’t ever finish this text if I was to list every single complaint that I have with the software by this company, I’d like to also state that it’s not an attempt to diss Adobe, whatever company it was I would still mention that I’ve had problems with it, for example Cavalry, an obscure motion graphics alternative to After Effects that wasn’t really an alternative back when I tried its beta builds and 1.0, at least that’s what I can recall.
I am still waiting for my beta tester license.
Adobe Photoshop might come with the latest and greatest technology breakthroughs of the last years applied to image editing, but these features didn’t mean anything to me if I couldn’t use them without Photoshop crashing every ten minutes. 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.
And thus, my migration to alternatives begun.
This alternative didn’t have to be free and open source, although I had been trying that one program first as possibly a replacement for Photoshop, it was nowhere near that. You know what they say: “Mistakes are life’s greatest lessons”, so it was thanks to the mistake of trying that one program that I decided to not put too much faith into free software. Don’t get me wrong! I love Blender, it is definitely one of the greatest feats of the open-source community software-wise; at least that’s what I’d like to think, I’m not exactly an open-source software connoisseur.
In the end, I stuck with this Photoshop alternative I kept seeing people talk about, Affinity Photo.
Cheaper, as functional as Photoshop, and overall more stable when running. Just about what I look for in creative software.
It may not have the latest and greatest cutting edge technology features, but I am willing to accept the tradeoff if it means I will not have to deal with crashes every few minutes again.
As for my main 3D software, it has always been Blender. 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 a couple times.