Reinder

I have now delivered all but one of the latest batch of commissions. Well done, me!

I will have room to do more commissioned work in April. Please check the Commissions Price Sheet for more information and terms:

I've successfully completed February Album Writing Month and will now focus on drawing again. I'll be traveling to Portugal without my laptop and without any musical instruments but with my iPad and Apple Pencil. First priorities will be a new Greyfriar's Isle story and unblocking myself from what is holding me back with the ongoing Tess Durban story.

I wrote two punk-ish songs during FAWM and by coincidence, my brother posted the only punk song from my The Hooded Crow days, written by me and recorded for our first demo in 1994. As with many of these songs, there was a long time when I didn't want to listen to it. But it turns out that writing new songs is not just a way to express myself, create new things and be part of a community, it's also an ongoing dialog with myself. So writing "Enshittified" last summer, and "In the face of the Eschaton" and "The Planet Spins" this February, has made me listen to my older writing with different ears. The Reinder Dijkhuis Punk Album would definitely have to include this track:

The Hooded Crow - Noisier Than Thou, 2024 remix on YouTube

As a reminder, the songs I've written this February can be found (with some very ragged-sounding demos) through my FAWM profile until the website goes back into hibernation sometime after the end of March.

The other day, I ran a number of old drawings through Glaze and found that my pencil art from several years ago takes it amazingly well. The header image conveniently focuses on a section of the image where you can see the Glaze artefacts, but only just. Compared to black-and-white and flat-colored images, where the artefacts are painfully obvious, these scanned traditional works with random greyscale tones and paper textures are good at hiding the tell-tale signs that the image has been processed through anti-AI technology. So I'm going to experiment a little more, with watercolors as well as more pencil artworks, and if the results are consistent, I will just go back to traditional art full-time.

I know that DeviantArt has an opt-out for AI training on images posted here, and I expect them to respect that opt-out, at least for the time being. But it's easier for me to have one canonical version of every image that I post everywhere, so that's why I've only been posting Glazed versions of images here for a few weeks. I even delete the non-Glazed version after the Glazed version comes in from WebGlaze.

Another thing I expect to be doing more is things that AI including DreamUp can't do well. Unorthodox aspect ratios, compositions that look different from the bulk of all AI-generated images (there's a depressing sameness to them, though it is possible to break the mould - this has as much to do with users' choices as with the tech), gritty textures, looser linework - hell, I've been evolving towards looseness for a few years now. Adapting to a landscape flooded with AI slurry isn't work that I should have to do, but I'm afraid what 'should' be doesn't come into the equation.

So change is coming. As always.

It's that time of the year again. I'm doing February Album Writing Month! You can follow my progress via https://write.fawm.org/@reinderd until the FAWM website goes into hibernation again. So far, I'm at three songs written, which means I'm on track but can't afford to slack off (yesterday, I slacked off, a bit).

Meanwhile, my brother continues his regular releases of demo tracks, studio recordings and outtakes of our former band The Hooded Crow with one of my favorites and one of the tracks I'd selected as a model for the songwriting project I'd chosen for this year's FAWM: Michel Bouma's composition "Ravine" from 1994, featured on our second demo. Here it is:

The Hooded Crow - Ravine

It was about time we got to rock out again! Sometimes, a guy just wants a big dumb riffy rocker, and "Ravine" delivers that, but it also has enough movement in it to keep things interesting beyond that. And it's a joy to play! I should know because I still play it frequently.

This weekend's video work was the lyric video version of "Sleeping, Not Drowning", a song I recorded last year during February Album Writing Month, in the rough and ready way that February Album Writing Month songs tend to get created. I used some of the artwork I made with a possible future animated video for the same track in mind, and… well, had an education in using iMovie to make lyric videos. It's not ideal, especially because everything is keyed to the background image, so that when you change the background image, all your text moves around and you have to re-time it. But it's workable.

"Sleeping Not Drowning" came to me as a rough idea while traveling to Portugal in January, and turned into a full song pretty quickly. It was always intended to sound like a 'lost' 1980s radio rocker, and for having recorded the basic tracks on a digital 4-track device in an improvised music room in an old Portuguese farm, it came pretty close.

So here it is: Sleeping, Not Drowning, lyric video version

Vocals are by Andrew Russell: https://ajrussell.ca