greys

2024 in Art...ish?

Published: December 31st 2024, 8:00:00 pm

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Dear friends.
This post is coming way later than I intended, and on top of that I am nowhere even near ready with a sticker preview and forecast for January... What a way to start the year, eh? If I tell myself I'm just doing a reverse-psychology kinda thing and that if I start the year off not-great, it'll end up great... Or am I just kidding myself? 😅 I PROMISE I AM WORKING ON THE STICKER PREVIEWS THOUGH!
At any rate, it is the new year, and may 2025 treat us more kindly than the one before, because boy does it feel like we are in need of a bit of a break.
Those of you who've been around for a few years may remember that I actually posted a template of this back in 2022. I'd wanted to make a whole new one for this year, but as the old adage goes: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I'll also attach the updated 2024 one for you as well to use, if you would like!
It was certainly an interesting experience trying to look back at every month and figure out what the heck I was doing art-wise. You can tell already that I did significantly fewer large-scale digital paintings, and a lot more traditional. At first, I thought I hadn't done anything because I couldn't find any of said digital paintings for each month, but then looking deeper into my folders, I realised...that actually, I did such a wide variety of art that wasn't just digital, and that's not a bad thing at all.
In fact, some months were really hard to pick out just one piece to represent the entire month. Which I guess isn't a bad thing either. How do you narrow down an entire month to a single produced piece, after all? Not to mention, there are so many things that happened outside of the images that don't even come through. Normally I would do a bit of bullet journalling to wrap up the year, but I haven't done that again this year (and the past few lol oops), so... why not just lay it all out there and do it here for you all? 🤣 But since I don't want to bore you all either, I'll try to keep it to 1-2 sentences max per month.
JANUARY started off relatively strong (including weather-wise since I had my first flood warning in the new house) with lots of motivation and ambition and ideas. Officially started The Artist's Way.
FEBRUARY we still continued full-steam ahead, including some planning for IRL stuff.
MARCH was when I hosted my first ever in-person life drawing session, and I took two weeks for my own Artist reTreat!
APRIL was the month of Plein Airpril, which I managed to complete 17!
MAY was when I busted my ankle whilst travelling 🥲 but I still managed to get some travel sketching done.
JUNE mainly was focused on starting physiotherapy and other recovery, with a little bit of some dabbling in new stuff like voiceover videos.
JULY is an utter blur lol but there seems to have been some experimentation and stuff??
AUGUST I was deep in food gouache paintings!
SEPTEMBER was a highly emotional month, marred by a big loss but also with some joyous meetings with friends in-person.
OCTOBER was StreamINK, and even though I didn't manage to do many of the prompts, I still had a lot of fun with it and discovered so many new amazing artists!
NOVEMBER had a lot of travelling, including a last-minute trip back to Vancouver, in which absolutely nothing got done lol.
DECEMBER marked the official 3-year anniversary since my first stream -- and I had my last stream indefinitely.
In case you missed that last one lol. I announced at the year-end Patrons hangout and the following stream that it would be my last one for the foreseeable future. There are many reasons for it, which I won't go into in detail here, but having so many people sending messages of support and well wishes really made me feel so grateful and helped ease some of the anxiety I've been having around this decision.
By no means was it an easy decision, but I'm so freaking appreciative to everybody, and especially you all. It's absolutely not the end of this art journey either, but more like a turning point. I'm going to be reclaiming my time in order to really focus down on the things that I have been wanting to create, and try new things that I constantly gave excuses for not doing (mainly that I had no time).
Personally, I'm really excited and more than anything, I feel that this is what I need to be in order to be true to myself and what suits me. So while a small part of me was terrified that I'm letting people down and disappointing everybody... As a recovering people-pleaser, this is just something that I need to do for myself. I can only hope that that is in itself something that can help inspire at least one other person out there to do something that fulfills their own self first and foremost, and not because it's what's expected or desired of them by others.
I also hope that you'll continue with me on this journey, wherever the hell it takes me (and us). Thank you all so much for being here, from the bottom of my wee lil heart. 💖