It has been a....well...few months here in the studio, so here's a quick run-down. We were evacuated out for 2 fires for 8 days, then since we have been home we have had massive flooding. Thank goodness our home is ok, but our community less so. There is a river that cuts through town that is usually just considered a creek., but its swelling about 10 ft outside of it boarders every time it rains. Roads are being washed out and new pathways for water are being cut and there isnt much anyone can do till the monsoon season ends in a couple of weeks. For now we avoid leaving the house when it rains so were not caught in anything, but its heartbreaking diving around town and seeing homes and business destroyed from both fire and water. Our infrastructure is being rebuild as much as possible and we were without internet at all for the first 2 weeks back. We tried 3 different services and all of them either didn't work, or were so slow they were unusable. After 3 weeks our cable provider was able to get our area restored, so we went back to cable, only to find that they updated the wiring (Yay) but our modem no longer worked (Doh!) We were getting 2-10 Mgb/s which was barely enough to load youtube.... Now, in all of this my previous computer gave up the ghost. Many of the programs I rely on just were not running anymore and so I bought a new rig and started transferring files over in a second drive....which promptly reformatted on the new machine and I lost everything. All my art files, all my social media files... All Of It.
Now, I DO pay for a auto back up service, and the last time that service updated was before the fire, so I have 99.7% of my files, but that are on the cloud, all 800 Gigs of it. Which I couldn't access because our internet was so slow. I finally ended up at a friends place to download the necessary files and nothing else. just the main art files. Overnight I managed to get most of them, but still was short 120 gig. I brought the drive home and plugged it in to get the last 120 gigs...which took 32 hours.
Basically all of this has put me 6 weeks behind in EVERYTHING. We literally JUST got a new modem sent to us today and this is the first time I have been able to do anything of substance online, which I will be busy working on everything over the next week and seeing what I can get done, and what I can replan for later.
That DOES bring us to today, which is the start of Smaugust. I have tried to take part before, but have usually had large projects that needed to be worked on. This year is less art, and more business, but I think I have a work around. Ill be making stretches and thumbnails and at the end of the month picking a few favorites to make into full paintings. I have a prompt list that I created back in 2018, but never used all of, so I'm starting there. Here is the first rough with the prompt Twilight. She is a night dragon waiting for the sun to set to begin her flight across the sky and in her arms she holds the moon. Her talons are helm up to the light so she can see the final beams fade between her fingers. I'm digging the concept, I might have to play with the composition a bit more.
Tomorrow is Bubbles, and I don't have a clue what Ill be doing yet, but it should be fun. Its awesome to be so loose again, its been a while and I am enjoying just playing.
Thank you!
Carla