2022-06-16 Welcome to Blender Artists
It was June 16th that I discovered Blender Artists. I was looking at isometric rooms because I lusted after doing one of those during the curve survey. I felt ready to do an actual scene, and those rooms are perfect little scenes; compact, with limited, simple assets, achievable in a reasonable amount of time. Well, at least that’s true for the ones I started out looking at first. And then I found a really amazing one, light years beyond the common fare. Somebody was stretching the envelope.
Here it is:
I was amazed. He has two other works in a similar vein. though alas he hasn’t posted anything in a long time. I was so excited I made an account here just so that I could leave a comment. Joseph “liked” it, and that was my gateway drug. It really was, however weird that may be (especially weird for me since I’m not particularly into external validation – never got it to begin with, and then learned I could do without). If nobody had reacted (I don’t think it reached the creator for whom it was meant), I would have drifted right back out of here because my focus was on other things; I wasn’t looking for a community. Funny, how such a little thing can change the road one’s on. I looked at Joseph’s portfolio, then at those of some people he was following, then the forums, and I liked the generally positive, helpful, encouraging tone. Suddenly I thought being part of such a community could be nice, mutually supportive of fledgling artistic efforts, learning from each other… I decided to hang out for a bit, see how it went… Good decision.
I love 3D dioramas. Many of them are really too cute for me; it strikes me as mildly ironic that much of my early Blender work is cute when I am not generally much into that and would have rejected the lot of it before starting to learn Blender. I am much more drawn to the absurd and macabre, the abandoned and decrepit, the eerily magical, fantastical – not so much the pastel and roly poly OMG kawaii. So this vintage kitchen was somewhat more in the direction of my actual interests.
I’ve long loved dioramas; got really into making them as a child, then stopped because I was being discouraged from “frivolous activity”, and had no room of my own to store them. Well, I’ve long since divorced my toxic birth family, and digital is the solution to real-life storage problems. So recently Blender caused me to revisit memories of my childhood and the (horrified) reaction I got to making a diorama centred on a dead bird I had found – I had lots of complicated thoughts around that, but nobody was interested in talking about it, they were too hung up on what a dirty deviant I was. And to exorcise that memory I had the reactionary idea of a series I’d call “die-o-rama” which would involve death in some way. Not horror (I hate horror), but more subtle, more “thinky”. The name is kind of obvious and when I did some research I found that of course it was already used, and of course it was mostly about horror.
But one person I found was going more in the direction I had in mind – Kojima Miyu. a Japanese woman whose job is cleaning up places of the recently deceased, and she makes dioramas of the apartments of kodokushi (“solitary deaths”), where people die alone and are not found for days or weeks (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/10/dioramas-of-death-tokyo-cleaner-recreates-rooms-where-people-died-alone).
So don’t get too used to the cute. It’ll be around for a while longer, and I admit, it has grown on me more than I expected (because of my interest in stylization and because Grant’s stuff is too good to just blithely disdain :wry grin:), but once I feel more competent, things will probably get darker.