For those that didn’t catch the last major blogpost I wrote, I had announced that I’m beginning 2023 in a brief hiatus period, hopefully one of the final breaks from major productivity I will take, to focus on the holidays, my own health and, perhaps most importantly, changing my setup up to better benefit the various ventures I wish to take later in the year. Now with the holidays ending and the days getting longer, my plans are to slowly climb back into a productive state over the next few weeks/months. This includes resuming or getting back to grips with some hobbies of mine that I fell out of as the years went on for one reason or another, but one of those is of greater importance to me than the rest: Good ol taking a pencil and paper out and drawing.
Yeah it’s safe to say that I become a lot slower at drawing since 2018 or so and even my latest art from last year took me a whopping six months to complete. Using a mouse to make art may be good for precise strokes or lines and I have made it work in the past, but to make my art feel more organic and less time-consuming, I had to explore other options to bring myself up to speed and get some of these ideas I’ve had for art out the door. Of course I may still make some art the way I once did, mouse and all, but in a much faster process that doesn’t leave me zoned out and looking for frequent breaks and distractions, and I want to start making an attempt to break away from these old, bad habits of mine so I can feel more accomplished with my content and not feel like I have to rely on posting the same old art many times over the years or commission artists to fill the gaps. At the same time, breaking away from just drawing my original characters, a trait that ended up being bolted to my brain by an artist I follow back in 2012 or so, is another objective of mine, if only to give me more subjects to draw and represent a combination of well known and obscure fandoms and try my hand at adapting characters I never thought I would ever make fan art of into my style.
While art is not the only thing I want to get back into, it is by far the biggest thing I want to be the most known for aside from programing video games and maybe becoming a video game live-streamed, and being an artist is the one hobby that I feel like I can do decently with my current skillset and with all this equipment I have lying around and plan on setting up, I should be in a better position to experiment with returning to art, traditionally and digitally. I also would like to make a return to creating sprites and forming full sprite sheets using new techniques and tricks that I learned in the past few years and from observing game assets over the 2010’s and early 2020’s now that I’ve been figuring out Aseprite, a program that is much more strongly fit for creating custom sprites than recent versions of Photoshop (though I still do use Photoshop for a fair bit of sprite-making).
Over the holidays, I thought really hard about what was stopping me in my tracks and preventing me from committing to finishing projects in a short time for so many years. While there are certainly other factors, I think social media and the many distractions it has provided may or may not be the one defining contribution to my continued boredom and unwillingness to draw art and finish projects. In fact, last June, I made a new artist Twitter with the intent of using it in the off-chance I regained the confidence to draw more regularly, especially after my main account, Superjustinbros, became flooded in retweets and the occasional meme as time went on. And with twitter’s busted algorithm and other recent changes from the past year, it does not feel the same and I wouldn’t mind scaling back on using social media when I'm at home and could be getting creative in my free time.
Speaking of Twitter, even if I do want to limit my interactions on social media to improve my mental health and drive myself to be more productive, I do intend to make my main account, Superjustinbros, art-focused as well to an extent. That said, AozoraJustin (as well as my currently neglected DeviantArt account) will be the prime stop for anything I create, as the name would strongly fit as a professional alias if I ever expand my horizons into new ventures (and I may open a new YouTube account under that name for bigger projects while rebooting SuperJustinChannel into a channel for smaller, more personal projects).
I did create a Discord server as a form of future-proofing but it is currently not ready nor intended to be opened to the public at this time. As for my other sites and social medias, I began to use the Aozora blog as a showcase of convention commissions as I don’t exactly have any other use for it for the time being and if I wanted a blog focused on Aozora, I would prefer to make a website focused on Aozora and my other game concepts from scratch rather than use Blogspot. Of course Super Justin the Blog is a more casual space to give updates on personal life, events, and miscellaneous content I create that doesn’t really have a place on these other sites, and while I do plan to give this blog small updates (especially a new banner with updated render) the current state of Super Justin the Blog will likely be carried over into the future and beyond (and because I really miss 2000’s era websites in this day and age).
Oh look at the time. It’s late and I got a speed running marathon to check out next week. I’ll be back with more content when the time comes to do more writing.
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