Have you done art besides writing?

I can't sing a lick although I'd love to. And at one time in my youth I was working on playing the guitar, but because of a hand injury that went bye bye. I can't draw more than stick figures so that's out. I do make a few things that could be considered artistic. I made my wife this from a white agate I found. It was a lot of shaping and polishing.

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I also do a little hobby photography. Mostly landscapes, sunrises and sunsets, that kind of thing. Like this one:

baker sunrise.JPG

Comshaw
 
Photography
Pen & ink drawing
Calligraphy
Silk Screen printing
piano
barbershop harmony
sculpting (snowmen)
 
On top of writing, I do photography, mostly landscapes, but I dabble in many other things. Software development mostly happens at work, but I also do some outside of the office. I do think there is an art to writing software beyond just the code. UX design is certainly part of it, but making complex systems work together is more than just code. It does seem like people are bound and determined to encroach on all three with AI. I don't quite get why we have decided that computers should be doing art while people are stuck with manual labor. Something seems a little off about that hierarchy. At least there is writing on Literotica since most of the LLMs have guarded against producing anything salacious or erotic for now.
 
I do a lot of things... music, painting, photography... I'm not really good at any of it, but I remember a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, where he said that skill doesn't matter. Simply doing it makes you a more interesting person.
 
Photography but just as a hobby. Not sure how many people will know what I'm talking about for this next one. I "map" songs (unofficially) for a virtual reality game called Beat Saber. The songs that come with the game (EDM) are not ones I like. So I searched the internet and found a way to map songs by bands I like (Five Finger Death Punch, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Metallica, etc.). It can give you a pretty decent cardio workout. If interested to see what I'm talking about, just Google: beat saber video. Add "otterwordly" in the search, and you can find a ton of augmented reality videos by a girl who is a total badass in Beat Saber. Most of her videos are at the top difficulty level, Expert+. She's my hero. And it has nothing to do with her being cute. Seriously......ok, maybe a little bit. :)
 
I sang in choirs from the age of seven until my late twenties, played (and still play) piano, violin and the great highland bagpipes.
Was involved in most school plays from secondary school onwards
I also studied art as one of my subjects for Matric (home country equivalent of A-levels / final school exams) - can't draw people to save my life but was pretty good at landscapes / still lives.
Do you own a piano
 
In grade school I acted a bit. I was stage crew on Peter Pan, Fools, and Dracula. I also played Archangel Michael in a Noah’s Ark play and the Norse Muse God Frey in a Thor & Giants play at a Waldorf school. Some people have also accused me of acting like other legendary trickster characters at times. I just do it for laughs. I can do comedy, but not everyone gets my sense of humor.

I have also dabbled in singing, painting, and drawing but never gotten serious about these things. I ran track in high school and have practiced mixed martial arts all my life. Mom tried to get me to learn the piano once. Didn’t work. I can cook and mix drinks as well as most people. And I’m an excellent driver.
Let's see:
- My literature teacher told me I'm lacking any semblance of insight or the ability to really convey or understand feelings and emotions in works and my book report essays read like boring descriptions of what happened.
- My music teacher told me, that I have wonderful hearing and the singing voice of a hoarse crow.
- My arts teacher and I came to the agreement that I don't torture him and he doesn't torture me in exchange.
(fortunately for me, the STEM classes had much better teachers and I was much more interested in STEM topics anyway)

A few decades later I actually learned to love literature and write poems and stories. I still have the voice of a sick crow, but that doesn't stop me from happily singing to myself for hours every day, if I'm in the mood, working tirelessly on bringing the most out of my voice. I draw maps of fictional worlds in my spare time, though in that case it's not as much drawing as it is modeling by using several compositing techniques and minimal manual drawing.

The fact is, I lack the fine motor skills to really draw even just a proper straight line, let alone anything complex, but fortunately, maps rarely have straight lines :p

Would I consider any of those art? Nah.. Maybe the poems, most of those have soul, meaning and purpose. I only write those when something is on my heart or in my soul that wants to get out, or when I can't find a better expression of something I want to say. The rest, it's just self serving fun for my own entertainment.
 
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I design jewellery. I've tried my hand at smithing, and it turned out better than I expected. Unfortunately, for the good stuff I have to go to the local goldsmith. It's an expensive hobby, if hugely rewarding.
 
Sketching. Although I haven’t done any female nudes yet. Send in your black and white photos…
 
I'd like to get in screen printing and sculpting(specifiacally foam), and learning to play lutes(except harpsichord). I could bring some of my creep girls to life, like the one up there, and make shirts.
 
Not for a while, but I wrote music for a long time. Anything from psychedelia to death metal just for the fun of it.

Plant breeding, too. Not necessarily art per se, though there's a unique satisfaction to being able to see the fruits of your creativity grow day by day, without having to take them to school eventually!
 
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