Practicing Patience with Personal Projects

This year, 2024, I focused on practicing the techniques taught by Chris Koeppen to make progress on Distant Era’s Gods and Heroes of the Aegean project we conceived in 2021, planned in 2022, and photographed in 2023. I’ve also had to focus on practicing patience. The time it’s taken to complete even one image I’ve been satisfied with has seemed tortuously long. And yet, that artwork fulfills not only the vision for the project but that initial inspiration for what Distant Era could do and be. So by that metric, the time has been worth it. As we near the end of 2024, the second in the series awaits completion as much needed client work fills my time.

Sarah Scanlon as Pandora in *Gods and Heroes of the Aegean*, by Distant Era.

Practicing Patience

When we were small children in the late ’70s and early ’80s, my siblings and I took road trips with our parents in a series of big brown or green station wagons with wood-grain designs running along the sides of the car. There wasn’t much to distract us then—no movies or iPads or phones. The Walkman was just coming on the scene, but we didn’t own one then. Sometimes we had activity books, or we’d play “I Spy” or other verbal games. Most of the time, we spent those trips staring out the windows, watching the mile markers and telephone poles pass by, or trying to name the states and their capitals. At night, we pretended we were on board the Millennium Falcon, gunning down pursuing Tie Fighters as represented by the headlights and tail lights of the cars on the highway.

“Are we there yet?” we’d ask our parents. “How much longer before we get there?”

“We’ll be there when we get there” was a common response. And so it is with this project.

Subjects and Verbs

As I’ve practiced compositing basics, masking subjects and matching them to environments has become smoother. But Gods and Heroes of the Aegean‘s narrative goals demand that the work be more detailed and specific. By contrast, no stories are shown in Distant Era’s previous fantasy portraiture project, The People of Light and Shadow. The portraits have a mood and a point of view, but no action. They are subjects without verbs. Making those verbs clear, which is to say, showing concrete, identifiable action, has been the true challenge of this project.

Anti-Stagnation

There’s a significant amount of trial and error in Gods and Heroes of the Aegean. When a promising direction leads to a dead end after a week or two, it can be disheartening, as such things can stall the project for a time.

In 2025, I’d like to make more personal work than in 2023 and 2024. Personal projects are the way we get better. The plan for focusing on Gods and Heroes of the Aegean as my sole personal project seemed like a good idea at the time, but sometimes I need to exercise different muscles that aren’t getting any stronger with a solitary focus. So the goal for 2025 is to make new and different work that’s easy to execute while continuing my very favorite, very laborious, passion project. We’ll see how that works.

Realizing the Art

Absolutely gorgeous artworks of Pandora arrived last week, and they are breathtaking to behold. Worlds beyond the silly selfie above.

While I’ve talked about nothing but Distant Era’s personal projects in this post, I’d be remiss not to mention the client work that arrived with Pandora. Check out this beautiful matted art print of storyteller Megan Wells as Clara Barton, one of Megan’s series of historical women that she plays.

Gods and Heroes of the Aegean

June 24, 2024

Gods and Heroes of the Aegean: PANDORA

June 17, 2024

Introducing Gods and Heroes of the Aegean

steven Latest posts

Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

View all

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.