Every so often of late I find myself marveling at how when I dare to really form a question around an issue that has been on my mind, every so often, the exact answer I am looking for will be bounced back at me. The Secret would define that as the “Law of Attraction” and The Artist’s Way would call it “Synchronicity”.

I just call it “very handy”.

The question I find myself asking more and more often is how is it I can have such a love of animation, but such a fear of its pursuit?

Today’s answer came in the form of a video that someone on Facebook actually sent to me a few days ago, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to sit down a watch until today. The video is Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity which I have included at the end of this post as well.

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I have had a love-hate relationship with my Wacom tablet since I first got it. My parents purchased it for me while I was recovering the car-vs-pedestrian accident that I was on the wrong side of in December 2003. While I was fairly upbeat about my recovery, I know in hindsight that I wasn’t in the greatest mental state at the time. Thus when I couldn’t immediately master the tablet back then, I set it aside and simply never picked it up again. It collected dust for years because I figured it was just a lousy tool for me, despite the fact I was well aware that digital artists eveywhere were raving about how quickly and easily they could do their work using a tablet. To make matters worse, when I moved in late 2007 I lost the tablet pen, which is more than a little essential to its operation.

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Even though I haven’t been blogging, I have been muddling my way through some of my projects with varying degrees of focus and success. Here’s how these past couple weeks can be summarized:

Madame Butterfly is now officially on the backburner and may or may not come off again. While I was initially enamoured with the idea of strutting my stuff in the Vancouver Operabot contest, ultimately I wasn’t inspired with the project itself. Since I’m still pretty shaky in my animation skills–particularly in Flash–I know I need to be either working my way up to something like a full-blown short or at the very least working on something that I can really sink my teeth into and means more to me than the possibility of winning a new Wacom tablet.

I am however excited to be picking up my replacement pen for my old tablet at the post office this evening. I lost the old pen when I moved and I have high hopes of what I’ll be able to achieve once I master the tablet for Photoshop and Flash.

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My original intention for this blog was to make it somewhat “professional” and offer insights as well as displaying successive steps to creative accomplishment. The fact that I haven’t updated in over two weeks shows exactly how inspiring that idea ultimately ended up being for me.

The truth is I have a day job where I am supposed to be professional for 45hrs a week as it is. What’s all that personally inspiring about feeling like I need to put forth a professional face after work hours as well? Particularly when the whole point is to try and light my creative kindling.

Plus I also feel that there’s a bit of a lie inherent in that professional face if the other half the intent is to provide insight on what it means to have a creative life as well as the day job. There’s this belief in our society that artists and creatives must have their acts together in order to produce great work. Leonardo never doodled in the margins. Every note that Beethoven put to the page was golden. It’s the perfectionist disease that all too often stifles all the might-have-beens… even if it’s just those seemingly regular people who might-have-been happier if they could just allow themselves to get messy and unblock their creative desires.

So I’ve changed the blog’s name to “Multimedia Alchemist” as a nod to the shift in focus. Of course I will still be talking about web design, animation, painting, writing, etc., but there will be a bit more messiness–and a bit more “me”–in here as well.

Continuing to work on the “Madame Butterfly” animated short. Yesterday afternoon I spent time both working on Butterfly’s character design as well as getting a handle on Flash CS4’s drawing tools. Flash has come a long way in terms of control of gradients over the years and I was happy to discover that you can now apply gradients to strokes, as well as create and control various custom gradients. You can also get a nice softened shape effect by just applying an inner dropshadow to the shape and blurring the heck out of it.

I’ve been learning quite a bit through the Lynda.com video tutorial library. It’s a subscription based service, but I have definitely been getting my money’s worth out of it thus far.