You've heard that Social Distortion song, right? It's good, a personal favorite.

It's December, the year is winding down, and I am trying to come up with some sort of blueprint or roadmap for 2023. But I have one show left before I do that, the Nocturnal Art Market at Little Animals Brewery in Johnson City, TN. 

Additionally, I do know of one thing that's going to definitely happen next year:

That's right, Pouncepunk is returning in February and Richard Graves and I already have the prompt list finished and ready to go so folks can start planning and working ahead!! I'm ecstatic about this, we're hoping it'll be even bigger than this year's challenge was.

But yeah: it's been just over a year since we sold my dayjob and I set out to try to make a living off of doing art full time. And...it hasn't really been successful. So I'm going to take this month to sit down and work out what I can do to try to make next year better, how to engage more people, get more Etsy sales and Patreon subscribers, more commissions, more work in galleries, all of that. There's no single path here that's going to work, it's going to be a lot of juggling. I feel like I probably could've done more this year, but I'm still figuring things out and getting a clearer picture.

To that end, I also will be starting to push my work in some new directions, playing with new media and such. Here's a recently finished painting, done primarily in gouache, to try to signal this new direction:

I'm also looking over everything I've sold this year, what's done well, what hasn't, and will be working on all new stuff to have in 2023...including the return of Nodzilla!!

Oh, also: I HAVE A NEWSLETTER NOW through Substack! I've sent two out so far, with a third one coming later this week. Please subscribe!

One more thing: I once more participated in a daily art challenge of my own making called Nude November, in which I drew or painted a different nude every day of last month. Most of them were quickly done in my sketchbook. I posted all of them in their own gallery here. There was no desire here to try to make *finished* work, I treated it purely as an exercise to get my hand moving and put marks on paper. Many were done from reference, nudist movies I was watching (that new AGFA box set of Doris Wishman's nudist films is delightful), but also people I met online thru nudist Twitter who were gracious enough to let me draw or paint them! It was fun, and relatively chill. I don't think I spent more than 30 minutes on any of them.

Still a lot of work to, but we've gotta take time to rest and reflect, right? I may do another blog post at the end of the year to look back on what I have accomplished this year, or just wait til early January to do that. We'll see!

Stay warm, take care, see you next time.