LATEST WORK:
Here’s the latest portrait painted in Rebelle 5 Pro (Seoyeon of fromis_9):
The gold filaments in the background had to be painted in Photoshop using the emboss lighting tool, because Rebelle’s brush engine can’t do really thick impasto like that yet.
On a related note, I was in the beta-testing group for Rebelle 6, and the new version has some great new features (especially Liquify, which is more intuitive than Photoshop’s), but the brush engine still can’t do the kind of dry brush/scumbling effect I badly want and need in Rebelle, which means I still have to export to Photoshop for that type of brushes. I posted about it in this thread on the official forum: https://www.escapemotions.com/community/forum/t/2804/rebelle-badly-needs-some-dryscumbling-brushes/4
WEBLOG:
2022 was a productive year for me. I painted about fifteen portraits (far more than any other year) because I was working on figuring out the ideal balance of expressiveness and fidelity. I still haven’t achieved it, so I’ll just keep on painting until I do.
On the writing front, I worked on the first draft of my current novel-in-progress, Darkness Falls. It’s technically a version 1.5 draft since I had already written about 75K words several years ago but scrapped most of it. I’m at about 85K words now, and I predict it’s going to be a long one—probably about 150K words. It’s part of a series, so I’m in it for the long haul. I let some of my students read the finished chapters and they were all on the edge of their seats and loved it, which gives me a lot of hope. I’m pretty certain first draft will be completed in 2023, and if I get all the beta-reader feedback for Wings of Promise, I’d like to start the second draft for that as well.
I finally returned to making music more seriously in 2022. It started back in 2019, when I decided to pick up the bass again, bought a few basses, and practiced diligently. Then when I was asked to teach guitar lessons, I started buying guitars again and worked hard on leveling up my skills. This was after having stopped making music for almost ten years and having sold most of my gear back in 2017 after not really using them for several years after having decided to focus on writing novels. When I sold most of my gear, I didn’t think I’d get bitten by the music-making bug again so soon, but I guess if you love music to a certain degree, just being a fan won’t be satisfying enough—you will feel that burning desire to create.
So now I have about sixteen guitars and basses, and bought a bunch of new MIDI gear and sample libraries during Black Friday. The most notable purchases were the Strandberg Plini Neck-Thru Edition, Aristides H/08, Expressive Touche SE, Leap Motion, TEC Breath/Bite Controller, an 88-key and a 61-key MIDI keyboards, Audiobro Geneiss Children’s Choir, SampleModeling Strings, Arron Venture Infinite Woodwinds, EastWest Hollywood Orchestra Opus Edition, Dreamtonic’s Synthesizer V plus a few vocal banks, all the XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums’ expansion packs, as well as their XO drum machine/sample organizer. On the mobile front, I also got Cubasis 3 and Audio Evolution Mobile Studio. There are more but those are the ones off the top of my head. So yeah, I’m pretty serious about getting back into making music again.
BTW, here’s a photo of all the past and present guitars and basses I owned/own (red X means I no longer have it): 
I currently have a City Pop song in progress, as well as a prog metal song. I don’t really have any serious ambitions for going back into being a professional musician again, but if it happens naturally and feels right, I have nothing against dipping my toes back into it.
Oh yeah, and I turned fifty. But I still feel like a kid on the inside.
I’ll wrap up this blog post with a little story. I realized a couple of days ago that Elena has been gaslighting me for the twenty years we’ve been married. She habitually added one year to my age whenever the subject of age came up in conversations, and since I don’t really think about this kind of stuff much, I just got used to it and went along with her. But when I did the math, I realized I was turning fifty, not fifty-one as I had assumed. I bet she does this because she’s two years older than me and she doesn’t like that.
