week 29

taking small steps when the learning curve is steep

I love learning new skills, though can easily get discouraged without the structures and social supports to keep going. I think that is my challenge with writing (thankfully my writing group has been hugely helpful in building the deadlines and social supports that can generate some momentum)! It is also the case with learning animation, which is something I have always wanted to learn but have a heck of a time wrapping my mind around where to start.

Intellectually, I know that everything big needs to be broken down into smaller series of steps, but it’s still so overwhelming. There are online courses, sure, but so many of them. I don’t want to take away from my writing practice, and it seems like there is so little time to learn any new skill, much less one that can take people years and extensive education to really master. But since the pandemic hit four years ago, I keep thinking about Blender, a free program with which people have created remarkable characters, scenes, and stories. I can easily mourn the fact that I’ve spent the past four years not doing anything with it. But I have an idea that I have been playing with for a year and a half that I want to make into an animated short. Though I can give myself a headache even just thinking about the process or think I need to save thousands to take formal classes, maybe I can just start exploring in bits and see what happens.