A new experimental nerdy thing, for people who like hymns, sheet music, and textures:
How I make these hymn prints (as I’m calling them):
Typeset the first phrase (or so) in MuseScore using the Bravura font, with the spacing trimmed to within an inch of its life
Play it out loud to make sure I entered it right (cough) and export an SVG
Drag the SVG into a frame in Figma and use the SkewDat plugin to skew it -4°, center it, then export a 4,000px-wide PNG
Use ImageMagick to do some erosion and dilation (to simulate age and ink spread): convert input.png -morphology erode disk:18 -morphology dilate disk:16 output.png
Texture the image in Affinity Photo and export the PNG
Upscale with Real-ESRGAN to 12,000px-wide
Downscale a little in Affinity Photo, add 8% monochrome noise, and export the final PNG
I’m still figuring out how I want to do these (full bleed or not, barlines, clefs and key signatures or not, etc.). Also thinking about possibly doing some abstract versions as well, to avoid all these music typesetting issues entirely.
New story: Saying Goodbye. About eight pages long, science fiction.
This one came from wanting to write a story with virtual reality involved (which admittedly ended up being more of a bystander in the finished piece) and then my recent experience with my dad took over and became the main driver, though the details in the story are all quite different.
Together Forever II. This one came out of losing my father. (That said, it isn’t actually a depiction of my own family — my parents were divorced and I have more siblings than this.)
Abide with Me II. This has felt applicable to me a decent number of times these past few months.
New artwork: Before the World Was VII. Exploring the idea of using semicircles to represent Heavenly Mother and Heavenly Father. (The other ways I’ve tried so far include interlocking circles, yin/yang shapes, whole circles, triangles, and circle-and-triangle figures.)
New story: Bag Field. About twenty pages long, fantasy.
I started writing this story in March 2021 but didn’t get very far. Picked it up again at the end of August and here we are. Ten minutes of writing a day is still working well, by the way, especially when I look back at the year — six stories finished, roughly 90 pages together. Much better than not finishing anything. (That said, I do hope to spend more time on writing going forward.)
By Day and by Night, about the pillars of cloud and fire. I’d tried to do this piece multiple times in the past but it never clicked for me until I brought the pillars together at the center.