Grenbug

Art Update

April and May have been very productive months for me, but with not a lot to show. I continue to do Master Copies with Companion pieces each time, but most of them are so related to the master copy that I don’t feel good about posting them. Even this piece is highly influenced by a Max Wilkins (https://www.instagram.com/max_wilkins_illustration/) piece. He does a lot of tower stacked houses and I did a master study of one. Then for the companion piece I was thinking about how they looked like bird houses, then thought about birds that people could ride as sentries and made this piece of bird stables and rider barracks. (see the little, tiny people?)

I was really scared to add the bird. But I felt like the piece didn’t make sense unless I had an example of the big bird who could fly into the stack and the rider to show the scale of the bird and barracks. So, I had to be brave and add the bird! 🙂 I love how it turned out and it’s a concept I want to explore some more!

I am really enjoying my art practice. It’s work, and it’s so humbling at times. I have much higher desires than what I am able to accomplish with my art at this point, but it’s so much fun!

I have really dropped the concept of the 10k hour project. I’ll need to write up a post and update about it. At this point, I have classes and lessons that I take online, but then I have ongoing projects that I work on. Some days I only do a little bit of art, but other days, I will work on a piece for hours. And I find projects are more motivating to me than daily lessons. So, I’ll update that eventually.

For now, I am enjoying having a list of ongoing projects to work on during the week. I do what I can and if some days are light, that’s ok, because other days I will just sit and work on a painting all day.

I tried a different technique with this piece where I did the sketch and linework, then did shadows in a purple-grey watercolor. Then I added colors on top and was able to just paint color over the white and shadow. For example, the green of the middle house is one green color, just over the white paper and the purple shadow. So I didn’t have to mix a green and a shadow green color. I really liked this technique, it’s something that Yahya Rushdan (https://www.instagram.com/yahyarushdan/) says he uses. I loved how it worked and love how it turned out. But I should have taken photos of the process to really show it. I’ll do that next time.

Minecraft Update

I saved off my old worlds at the beginning of April. I also finished up all work on the Arcadia server. I didn’t play for several weeks while I decided what to do. I need to give myself more time to work on my art so I already committed to not doing any new videos at least until September. I am going to extend that even more and not do videos in 2026. I really want to work on my art skills so I can reintroduce my art and minecraft channel in the new year.

So, after several weeks away from Minecraft, I started a new single player world just to play and have fun. I’m not keeping track of anything, no goals, no ‘rules’, just playing however I want for fun. I’m mostly playing in Peaceful Mode just so I don’t have to battle mobs. I can play though the nights and explore caves with no worries, and I’m really enjoying it. It’s so much fun to play just for the fun of it.

I am making this my go-forward world. If I get back to making videos, they will not be the typical ‘lets play’ videos, they will be more art focused. I have ideas, we’ll see how they turn out. It’s only the end of May, and I am committing to not making videos for 2026! So we’ll see what happens between now and then.

Life Update

I have figured out that I can either have social media and blogs, OR I can read books. I can’t do both. Your mileage may vary. But my little brain will turn to the easiest thing, which is doom-scrolling news and social media. So I have setup ScreenZen on my computer, iPad and phone and blocked news and social media sites. I do allow Instagram since I love looking at other people’s art. But Bluesky, Reddit, and news sites are blocked. And then I read! I have been reading a lot more and really enjoying it. But it’s a hard habit for me if there is something easy like browsing and scrolling.

What’s sad is that I remember the rich and weird internet before the social media days. I remember all these weird wonderful blog rabbit holes you could fall into and spend a delightful hour stumbling into someone’s blog and reading about parrot care or paper making or remodeling old garages. You could dive into all kinds of cool hobbies that people had. It was delightful and wonderful, and I really miss it.

I want to go back to that cozy internet of sharing cool hobbies. No worrying about ads and monetizing, just sharing the fun in our lives. I’m going to try bringing back weekly updates so I can try to bring back some of that feel.

If you know of any cool hobby blogs, let me know! I’ll try to link to them too! 😀