There is a banality, simplicity to suffering and it's bedfellows sin and failure. Suffering requires neither courage nor effort and however told it is ultimately an act of moping: when you are stepped, yield and be crushed! And therefore being acquainted with suffering is the easiest thing in the world. Admittedly, sometimes the deep unhappiness of suffering is the healthiest, most natural response. But ultimately misery is uninteresting, because it is the state of total inaction. Struggle–now that is interesting. That is to live.

But when misery comes on, as one might imagine they do, when the soul has been ground into paste and the world is a nightmare–why go on at all? It may be that suicide is symptomatic of a lack of imagination: the natural reaction when one is unable to imagine a better future or a way to be happy. So in struggle as a counterpoint to suffering, we do not look merely for action. We look for imaginative action. And when the years wear on, the reasonings fray and dark rises within once more, one can offer no hope but to do better and more imaginatively. And to mourn. Mourn and continue on. Little coincidence Athena was patron of Odysseus, that great survivor.

"Yes, there is a dullness to misery and a tediousness to the unimaginative mind. Those both end in bad places." Or so one could speculate–who knows? Certainly literature which concerns suffering is vast, but for one who has lived through great suffering, what could they get out of that writing? Perhaps misery is not dull and the unimaginative is quite brilliant. But for whatever good the many logs of despair do, I think literature of joy and happiness makes for greater comfort to any traveler on the path of life.

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In the most recent cycle of the sun above the horizon, I experimented with drawing digitally. In my limited experience, what you learn drawing traditionally more easily passes over to digitally than vice-versa (and I believe this is a common conclusion among people who draw), which makes drawing digitally a suboptimal method to practice. Nevertheless, because the ease of digital linework and painting is a constant temptation–never mind that neither are necessary for animation–I gave it a try.

Although it's retrospectively common-sense, it took me some time to realize that there is a simple, reliable way to draw characters digitally: users missing obvious workflows is the constant tragedy of software. Method is as follows. Sketch a very rough layer to block out the character, on a second layer refine the block out with details so that it is all but finished and then on a third layer draw the line art. Determine through practice how detailed or loose you want to be on each layer–and watch out with line weight on the final! The beginner lives or dies by a thousand details.

In this case blue was first, brown second and black incompletely third.

On the traditional front it seems as though animating Violet Evergarden characters is foremostly the art of animating hair: I think it is therein the design difficulty reaches epoch. Dozens of hair strands without the rhyme and reason of bone and muscle, but nevertheless demanding an equal level of consistency frame to frame...