I genuinely hope the day's treated you all kindly and even if it wasn't a great time, that you had a little bit of peace and quiet.
Where have I been? Short answer is "Christmas."
I've been a little swept up off my feet the last couple weeks, mostly in a good way. The minute I finished up the art I had due for Christmas day, I moved on to the next thing and that was a laundry list of things my family needed me to, and that I wanted to do for them.
It's been exhausting but very rewarding too, and I got the last payoff I'd been waiting for just today. My mom suggested I make a montage to commemorate my younger nephew's first year with us and it just kinda blew up into a whole thing for the entire family instead.
Wasn't easy to do - in both a practical and emotional way - but I'm very glad that I could pull it off.
There were a bunch of other technical projects around the house that I'd either been putting off or that cropped up last minute, and if you know anything about my relationship with tech you'll probably guess how easy and straightforward those tasks ended up being.
How's this left me?
I've been just about entirely offline from social media for the past week or so, only interacting regularly with folks on my Telegram group chat and Discord server. I may have been a tad burnt out from the effort I put in and crashing as hard as I did right after, but I've taken good care of myself since then.
HRT has been kicking in a bit, but so far it's mostly been psychological effects. Nothing I haven't managed to handle, but it's still taken some more spoons to stay on top of things on that front too. Let's just say that it's been a bit of an adventure, but it's certainly one I've been preparing for for a very long time now. Get therapy if you have access to it.
So what's next?
TL;DR is that I got a lot planned and am really excited to get back into the swing of things.
I have something special coming up for myself and some close friends to roll in the new year, but that shouldn't stop me getting started sooner rather than later.
I got a decent backlog of some really fun commissions to finish up, as well as post up for y'all to enjoy, but also a lot of crowdfunded projects I've been wanting to dust off and get rolling for absolutely ages now.
There's really never a dull moment with what I do and just about entirely a case of how much time I can/am able to put into things and which of the several projects I wanna work on will get it.
I will take one last second to remind you that I am a crowdfunded artist and supported by a wonderful community of folks over on my website. The better it does, the less time I have to worry about making ends meet and the more time I have left over to focus on just making cool stuff to share with y'all.
Even if you can't afford that, I appreciate you following and enjoying my art in any way you can. Thanks for helping me turn what could've been an absolutely disastrous year into one where I learned so much about, and worked hard on improving myself too.
I feel like I'm in a great position to finally get to where I've been striving to be for the past 8 years or so, and I'm hoping it'll lead to more and better work from me for you all to enjoy real soon.
I can't fuckin' wait.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone. I hope it brings good things to you all.
