I'll be back in a few days with one more post to close out the year, whenever it lands at the end of the month or the first week of the month, so stay tuned!
With only a few days before the new year, you would expect a new year’s blogpost to be around the corner. This isn’t exactly that blog post, but it does kind of come pretty close to the end of 2022 so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was mistaken for the end of the year update I’ve done on this blog for a few years now.
For those of you that didn’t tune into my posts across the year, this year was a big, stressful mess. Even after doing what would become my only big art post of the year, my attempts and plans to do more art and big creative projects beyond that one post fell by the wayside as I focused on smaller projects and documents. I attribute this to some pretty bad physical health issues I was running into since the end of January, in addition to my mother’s back to back surgeries in the summer and me still struggling to get into a healthier sleeping schedule. There’s other parts that have been stressing me out but I think you can paint a pretty good picture about how this year was to me. Thankfully the year was still good, but considering what I had to deal with and my inability to focus on my passions beyond some game concepts, it could have been a lot better.
This was also the year, especially during the summer, where I noticed a lot of my current tech was either outdated or going on the verse of being labeled as such, and it also made me ponder if my current workstation, which has remained the same since about 2013 or so, is even suitable for creating the content I wish to be remembered for. Considering I’ve been struggling to get back into drawing art (and pixel art/sprites) regularly for years, even before the days of the pandemic, and now with there being no big events until next April, I thought maybe it was time to give a refresh to “the lair” so I can acquire try out some new tech that may or may not help with my creative output. I also decided to go on a small break and temporarily scale down on what I’m working on since it’s the holidays and Christmas is next weekend. I have no say on when exactly the break will end, but I’ll be spending most of it setting up the new workstation and whatever equipment I and up with.
In short, this is what I’m hoping to get into, or resume doing, in no particular order:
There’s more, for sure, though with everything on the plate these four seem like the most realistic possibilities with my current/forthcoming tech, programs, and equipment as well as my current skill level. I promise I will not be leaving everyone hanging as much as I did this year but I will need some time to get to grips with everything and I don’t think it’s worth sharing every little thing I create anyways. Plus my last attempt to return to traditional works in 2017 did not end in a way I would have liked (the drawing desk being too big for my room and ultimately discarding it a few months later) and that made me hesitant to return to it until earlier this year. When my attempt to go back to digital, as awesome as it turned out, didn’t last as long as it did thanks to what would happen in the middle of the year.
So that’s what I plan to do for the rest of December and the first few months in 2023 before the next season of conventions begins. As I hinted at I’ll have a followup post of sorts out sometime around New Year’s since there’s quite a few days left in December, and while I’m not quite done with chatting I’d rather save the rest for one final blogpost to cap off 2022 so I’m not confining it all to one somewhat anticlimatic post for everyone to take in all at once.
