What do y’all do?
My wife is a writer and I enjoy creating music.
Is there something, in particular, that you like to use (software, hardware, tools, utilities, etc.)?
My wife writes using whatever, she’s been collecting fountain pens more recently and I’m thinking of getting her a typewriter.
I like to use VCV Rack for music, probably the most engaging way I’ve created music for myself.
Photography and 3D modelling in Blender. The former I don’t do as much these days because every place I go is so incredibly packed with people.
I can see how crowds aren’t fun to photograph but people are beautiful in their own way, I hope you can enjoy photography again sometime soon.
Knew a guy in college who adored it, makes my heart swell just thinking about how he would look at the photos he took with admiration of the scenery he captured.
Hopefully, we shall see! It’s difficult because of physical reasons like lack of parking and transport, but it’s also mentally exhausting as an autistic introvert who doesn’t like being around crowds.
I am homebrewer (for now). After 6 years I eyeball nearly everything. How my friends put it - you never brew bad beer and it is always different.
There are some software tools but I don’t need to use them (mostly). For hardware/gear I have this DIY Frankenstein monster of brewery which works better than most bought ones I tryed.
How did you start out? Does it require much space or can I start relatively small and are there any safety concerns I should be worried about?
Like time I tried to ferment anything was a jar of pickles and they were too salty for King Neptune lol
https://beehaw.org/post/727140
Look in brewing community (I linked start guide for beer from there).
For beer you need 2 big pots (I use modified 50l pots) and fermentation vessel. You can start smaller but it takes same time and effort to make 10 or 50l of beer.
Safety - you could get burned. And sometimes need to repaint the kitchen when you make bombs.
Also I started when I was about 15 yo. My dad tought me to brew. He made the brew monster (it is little bit dangerous but it works).
I wrote for now because in 2 months I will be changing jobs - I will be working in brewery.
So I will change from beer to ciders and mead.
There’s a fantastic community on Reddit, /r/prisonhooch, that has lots of info and some of the simplist, easiest, least expensive ways to start making your own alcoholic stuff. You can start with a jug of plain store bought apple or grape or pretty much any fruit juice, some yeast (even plain ol’ grocery store bread yeast,) and some sugar. It’s really fun! & A whole lot safer than I thought it would be before I started diving into researching about it.
There are also cider making and homebrewing and other related communities there that are great, but the one I mentioned is, in my experience, the most welcome to newbies and is not prickly or elitist and weird like some of those booze making communities are.
Follow YouTube procreate painting videos. I’m not good at drawing or painting, but I like to put on a random step by step procreate video and follow it.
I like cooking too.
I know Bob Ross is a meme but the way he approached painting had a huge influence on my creative life, do you have any art styles or artists that you like to draw creativity from?
Do you have a specific cuisine or “oddball” recipes that you enjoy?
I do a lot of digital art. I draw sometimes, but my motorskills leave a lot to be desired (I draw with my wrist, not my arm, and I have shaky hands); so if I’m doing anything more than sketching, I need to draw in Procreate so I can keep retrying each line until it looks how I want.
Because of this, I usually stick to vector art, which is much cleaner regardless of motor skills. I lucked out and bought Illustrator when it was CS6 and not Creative Cloud, so I’m still using that and will likely continue to use it forever (I hate consumer SaaS with a passion).
I’ve been pretty impressed by what I’ve seen around here <3
I sing almost all day, still occasionally find time to noodle on guitar, and garden all the time. In the winter I’ll do wood burning art projects that usually get donated to charities for raffles.
Do you have any local charities that you normally donate to? Larger ones I might recognize ike Rotary and United Way or any specific organizations that you feel deserve some attention?
The only thing I create and donate is my hair hahaha, my small contribution but it’s nice to hear that someone has a hobby that impacts their community in a positive way.
We like to donate plants to the local library and food bank plant drives each spring, for local ones. The artwork is usually donated to Games Done Quick to benefit Malala Fund, Médecins Sans Frontières, Prevent Cancer Foundation, and others.
GDQ, MSF, and PCF??? Wow! Those are just the organizations that I recognize off the top of my head and I can already tell that you do great work. Very respectable, thank you.
I’ll look into making my next charitable contribution to the Malala Fund in honor of you because this is the first time I’ve heard of this organization.
Just to be clear, and to make sure I’m not taking more credit than is deserved, we donate the art to GDQ to benefit the various charities they work with (like MSF, PCF, and MF). We’re very much hobbyists but love that our projects can do good in the world.
Oh so like Rotary and United Way, the products/proceeds are aggregated by one organization and distributed to other charities?
That still counts in my book, you do work that benefits these charities and that’s what matters to me.
Precisely. And thanks, it does feel really rewarding
I like writing, drawing, painting, making comics, and I wanna get into Blender and game dev eventually. I have a big worldbuilding project that I have lots of other projects nested into. I have a webcomic that takes place in a small part of the big world, and sometimes I do paintings of the other areas that aren’t in the comic. It’s great because it’s just filled with everything I’m interested in, and when there’s a new interest, it gets thrown in there too :) I like traditional painting and only do digital for editing the colors cus I already stare at a computer screen all day for work, and then for gaming. Need a few hobbies that aren’t on a screen 😓 I make my comic with sharpies and coffee, and like acrylic paint the best.
Would you be able to share a link to your worldbuilding project? I know a lot of people like making concept art and background information then sharing them, not sure what platforms are popular for it though.
It’s all in notebooks still, I think I’ll eventually make a Neocities page on it. I think WorldAnvil gets used a lot but it’s more than I need rn. The comic is Wash-Run tho. Ty for asking! Do you have your music online anywhere?
I do not, I don’t quite have the motivation to share outside of the VCV Rack Discord (the software and most plugins are free if you are interested in music) but thank you for sharing your work! I’ll have to share it with my wife, she’s been reading a lot of webtoons.
i’m getting back into writing right now! writing fiction used to be a big interest of mine, but i lost confidence in my abilities and eventually developed anxiety around writing basically anything at all. i’ve mostly worked through that though :) my goal is to have a piece of writing of any length that i can say is complete.
my favourite method is writing by hand, specifically in cursive. i’m probably going to switch to using my phone with a bluetooth keyboard, though - i have fragments of a bunch of different things and can’t organize them easily on paper.
also, sometimes i draw, paint, or do linocut printing. making prints is a lot of fun! i’ve made band patches as well as original pieces. for mediums i like both linoleum and softer plastic blocks, but not the really soft ones as they tend to flake. but maybe it’s that my cheap speedball carving tool isn’t sharp enough lol
Are you interested in short fiction or larger works? My wife started out as an erotic fiction writer before she moved to the US where we met but she’s writing women’s fiction which I have enjoyed very much.
i’ve really only done short stories except for a silly thing i did for one nanowrimo. i’d like to write something novel-length at least once, though!
Follow YouTube procreate painting videos. I’m not google at drawing or painting, but I like to put on a random step by step procreate video and follow it.
I like cooking too.
