Looking to Blender, Part 0 - Intro

My whole life's been focused on 2D art--drawing, that is. It's been mostly traditional drawing, of course, from when I first picked up a pencil as a little squirt of a kid, up to a few years ago when I saw myself turn mostly to digital art. Regardless of the exact medium, drawing's always been my big love in art; painting, sculpture, none of it compares to just scratching out a satisfying little doodle.

Of course, that points to a danger of artistic complacency. Though having taken studio classes that force me to confront different traditional media have done their work in combating this, my ultimate comfort zone has never wavered. It's hardly in my interest to keep to this one thing creatively, much as I do feel it's my mother medium.

So, I'm going to go a step in a novel direction from here--I'm going to set my sights on learning the 3D modeling/animation software known as Blender. It's free to download and use, and though by all accounts it's a doozy to learn, is full of robust features and offers so much to anybody who can get all of it under their belt. It's something that I've had in mind for a while now, which I've not really acted upon; in the name of simple horizon-expanding, though, I'll just throw myself into it and see how well I can keep my head above the water to start with and eventually find my stride.

My idea from here on out is to document my learning of Blender, if only for the next few weeks now, in order to give an incentive to learn and create content for my blog and to give others an insight into my creative process. I will post, week by week, a new lesson I've learned or a new project I've completed. I'll begin next week with results from following any one of the numerous tutorials available for Blender, and will continue by conceiving and developing my own creations.

It's unfortunate to me that I came up with the idea to blog progress on learning something like this in this way; it would have made for a real neat semester-long project. That said, I don't plan on this just being something for me to do for some class--I plan on continuing on with Blender into the future regardless, beyond the blog, for my own sake, in the name of expanding my abilities and teaching myself new ways to create.

You can check out Blender yourself here, with the link to their main page: blender.org