Hey everyone!
October was...holy crap it was a lot. Physically, emotionally, the stuff in between, the month just never let up. I'm glad it's behind me, but I still feel like I need more time to recover.
And now I'm sitting here thinking about how little time there is before the year (and this decade) ends, and how really it felt like the bulk of 2019 was A Lot, just an exhausting gauntlet of a year altogether, and how little I have to show for how/why I'm worn out from it.
I certainly feel like I didn't accomplish much as far as art goes. I want to say I've just been grinding away, plotting to really break out and do some cool new things next year, and while I think my anatomy studies were extremely useful, I haven't really built anything off of them yet. I've spent most of this year scribbling out half-thoughts and incomplete ideas and just pushing them aside, repeatedly reevaluating my own work to figure out what I should do next and coming up uncertain. Just a lot of wheel spinning.
But let's set that aside for a second: what HAVE I accomplished this year?
Well, I've hosted Defining Bodies figure drawing every single month except for August, with our November meetup coming this weekend. I finally created a Patreon, which, well, still only has the support of three people, but I've been semi-consistently posting to it all the same. I made a Faerie Ishee minicomic, I taught a comic class, I've drawn 42 pages of Slimepunk (just finished inking one today!), I most recently got paid to draw mutant portraits of children at a Halloween event, I started a new Instagram account for my more adult themed art, I had two REALLY successful cons and some other not so successful, I helped judge a sculpture competition, I licensed more art to a friend's brewery in Florida, I got paid to model nude for the first time, and while I didn't participate in any gallery shows this year I got to see a bunch of friends find success with their own and made good new friends in the process of all of this stuff. And yeah, I spent close to three months just studying anatomy on an almost daily basis, developing a better sense of the human form than I've ever had before, and I've been studying from a huge stack of art magazines I got talked into buying from the local library as well, taking in as much as I can.
I've also been learning a lot of new things about myself, stuff that I'm still working out and will be for the foreseeable future, and have been on a bumpy road dealing with family illness stuff. Oh, and developed a dumb thing where my stomach produces too much acid when I stress about stuff. So, if the above paragraph still doesn't sound like much, at least I have reasonable excuses for the lack of finished work.
And despite how I feel about not having accomplished anything solid, I can also say I don't feel like I've wasted my time this year or could've used it any better.
Except for maybe the gouache painting I started this month and finally abandoned yesterday when I finally decided it wasn't working. But let's not talk about that.
I have no real plans in mind for the future. The aforementioned family thing keeps me from thinking as ambitiously as I'd like. I know some things are happening: figure drawing will continue for as long as I can host and as long as people are willing to come pose and draw. Slimepunk will continue, even if it takes months between page updates on the site. The next FRAG show is hopefully on December 14th. I will certainly be painting things as gifts for family, too. Plus, I think I'm teaching a class on how to draw mutant portraits early next year. That may not be much, but I'm still keeping busy.
...Um, that's it I guess. Sorry this was a weird one. It's getting colder, and the holidays are coming up, so before things get nuts again I guess this was a good time to type up a bunch of word vomit before I fall into a new cycle of doing a lot of stuff.
Hope you find some space to sit and breathe in between whatever you have going on yourself. Take care, I'll try to write again soon.