in all seriousness, i’m sorry for being away for so long ;;

without going too much into it, the world just kept kicking my arse. argle blargle

i will be attempting to respond to DMs, private discord messages, emails, etc over the next few weeks.

(slash possibly months, given how much my chronic fatigue has been making me sleep... hopefully not that long, though — our spoons have finally been trending upwards after years)

i was doing some research on the many different fm synth chips yamaha made, i was expecting there to be an obvious hierarchy of quality and abilities, but actually it's more complex than that

like i knew the opl3 and dx7 had more voices than the opn2, and that the opn2 can only do sine wave operators.. but in some ways the opn2 has an edge, bc it's multi-timbre

very interesting

i still really want the reface dx keyboard,

though also, i will say, netflix started me on the penultimate episode of season 20 (according to what he says) so. i'm not necessarily saying he never goes into colour theory

he is using the technical terms like "if you just have one hue you're only working with values" in this monochrome painting one

so it's not like he's necessarily _hiding_ that kind of thinking? but he's not (so far) _illuminating_ that thinking the same way as he is with brush choice either? if that makes sense

so yeah. i'm glad i can think about colours in that colour theory way already, cos i would have absolutely no insight into why he was doing any colours he was doing otherwise

so far two episodes in now, he is very much doing one main hue, one proximate hue, and one complementary hue

which is a nice standby for keeping things looking nice.

but if you couldn't recognise that already, it would seem like he had ten to twenty completely unique colours that Somehow end up blending nicely at the end

and that's just from one half an hour episode heh

but yeah like. he keeps saying it's about teaching ppl the painting

and he _is_ tutorialising about brush choice and brush technique (which as someone who's only seriously done digital painting, and analogue only being pencil and pen work, is pretty neat, can't do this the same way in a paint program)

but without discussing why he's picked the colours.. you might end up with un-harmonious palettes overall, if you were only learning from this

and similarly a couple of times his white for highlights "accidentally" got a little of the pink he'd mixed in below the white blob on his easel in

but pure white would seem very odd with the warm purples, making it just slightly pink keeps it being a proximate colour instead of something hueless (which also gets helped along with how much he's blending things on the canvas afterwards as well, but that little bit of pink in the mix is still necessary, not accidental)