Been a while since I've written here, hasn't it? I cannot say that all of that time has been spent on art, naturally, given the rather sporadic nature of my posts. Regardless, I've been keeping busy. Some writing, some doodling during the time not spent at the office.
About four years ago, I took stock of my artwork and where the faults were. I concluded at the time that I had a pretty good grasp of colour, but the lineart and anatomy was lacking. As such, I had posted a whole bunch of black and white nudes of my characters (which was admittedly fun) to my art sites, but with my focus on lines, I almost felt... scared to invest the time into colouring them. Colouring images had always been the most time-consuming aspect of my art and I don't do so well with sunk-cost (despite it being a fallacy). So the art remained uncoloured. But in late 2019, I made a New Years resolution to start colouring stuff again.
I began the year with this, one of the first images I had coloured in some time. It almost feels quaint given what happened later.
We all had high hopes for 2020, didn't we? It's amazing how quickly we were disabused of any hope, between the Australia wildfires and the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, felt like everything was going to hell already. I had actually tried making an extended chibi comic for Valentine's Day, but it took far longer than I thought. I still considered working on it and putting it out in March as a belated thing (or even setting it aside until next year).
Then COVID hit Toronto. It started with the NBA and the NHL, then theatres shut down. My office followed shortly thereafter. I've thankfully remained employed, able to the vast majority of my duties from home.
So, I've spent the last nine months in the comfort of my own home. Seems ideal for creativity, right? Well, yes and no. I'm a man of regular routine. Disruptions to that routine, particularly in the unpredictability of the early pandemic meant it was difficult to actually sit down and focus on art, particularly colouring. But I had started playing guitar again more regularly in November of 2019, and I could practice guitar licks for 15 minutes at a time over the course of the day. With the help of Yousician, I went from barely being able to strum Greensleeves to perfecting the riff on Seven Nation Army within about three months. Realizing the need for a better guitar than the $150 Squier I'd been using, I bought the Gibson SG I posted on Twitter (which not only sounds amazing, but I still can't believe the deal I got for it) and zeroed in on power chords. I was able to get a high score on American Idiot within a matter of a few days practice.
Guitar is certainly fun, but I'm hardly a pro player and with the pandemic, it's not like I've been able to find other people to play with. So what of my artwork? Well, once it became clear that this was the new normal during the summer, I realized not only that I needed to adapt to the situation, but also that it presented a good opportunity to experiment with cel shading in addition to the "cuts" method I used for shading previously. I'll be posting some of the results over the next few weeks and I hope you like them.
So what're the next steps? Well, I hope to post more content. It might not all be finished, but I'd like to get faster and maybe use some of my colouring techniques on sketches. Moreover, I'm going to overhaul the galleries on various sites and move my Hentai-Foundry and FurAffinity galleries. So look forward to that.
I'm not going to say I'm looking forward to 2021, because, well, it'll be more of the same for the time being. But I wish the best for everyone this holiday season and see you next year!
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3 years, 3 months ago
29 Dec 2020 18:04 CET
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