For these semesters blog entries, I wanted to join some kind of course about either Grease Pencil, Shader creation or Sculpting. I researched a lot which course would be the best for me, considering price, topic and the way it gets thought. I stumbled upon Patata School, which is a membership-based program with different courses mainly about Blender. Some of which are about Grease Pencil and Shaders, both in a very stylized way which is perfect for me!
In this first blog post I wanted to set goals I want to achieve this semester.
The main course I will follow is “2.5D Illustration in Grease Pencil”. It has 4 Lessons, after which I want to create a 2.5D illustration based on the topic I did last semester. This project will let me translate those themes into visual art, using Grease Pencil’s dynamic tools to animate Death as both a mythic figure and a cultural mirror. For this, I will probably design a character, place it in one or more fitting environments and animate it.
As a small reminder what I wrote about last semester:
Fear and anxiety are fundamental psychological responses that connect perceived threats to subsequent behaviours. The brain’s amygdala initiates these reactions, while the prefrontal cortex regulates them. Culturally, death is rarely seen as a mere end but rather as a transition, reflected in global rituals. Mexico’s Día de los Muertos uses vibrant marigolds, sugar skulls, and altars to celebrate life’s continuity, while East Asian traditions employ white to symbolize purity and spiritual release. In the West, black attire codifies grief as a performative, socially structured process. These rituals demonstrate how colour semiotics and symbolic objects embody cultural attitudes – whether death is feared, embraced, or ritualized. For example, Madagascar’s Famadihana ceremony emphasizes kinship through the rewrapping of ancestors, while Guatemala’s giant kites during Día de los Difuntos blend art, politics, and ancestral communication.
Storytelling and media further explore these themes. Films like The Book of Life (2014) contrast the vibrant Land of the Remembered with the desolate Land of the Forgotten, reinforcing the idea that memory keeps the dead “alive.” The Halloween Tree (1993) reframes Halloween as an educational journey through global death traditions, linking seasonal colours to humanity’s ongoing dialogue with mortality.
Ultimately, fear and death are not just biological or emotional experiences but cultural constructs, expressed through colour, ritual, and narrative. Transforming terror into meaning, grief into celebration, and the unknown into a shared human story.
Otherwise the courses 2D to 3D: Grease Pencil in Blender, Grease Pencil in the Real World, Paintify | Digital Paint for Blender, 2D & 3D Typography in Blender and Cavalry, Pixel Art in Blender and PataClay | Blender Clay Materials & Brushes would interest me (so…almost all of them). I will have to discuss how many I can achieve in this semester.
