Rendering Art
The past year has been especially interesting for me. Long story short: mental health issues and worrying about my place in the world. I'm still working through it but it's getting better than how it was several months ago.
I think, because of this, I've felt a little weird about my art recently.
I used to render my art in a more painterly, blender-heavy style. Due to my overall anxiety and lack of knowledge, I got frustrated and switched over to cell shading. It's why, even though I love watercolor and the storybook aesthetic of the Mario and Luigi series, I've always felt disastisfied with how those attempts came out.
I don't know why exactly but I found myself slowly returning back to that original rendering style.
Cure Melody from "Suite! PreCure" (first/left) and Aika from "Pretty Please I Don't Want to Be a Magical Girl!" (second/right)
I still feel that sense of disatisfaction and anxiety of rendering this way though, I feel like it's better now but that might be recency bias. Imposter syndrome might be coming into play as well.
Because of this rendering-crisis, I noticed that it has affected me using cellshading. In this case: avoiding it.
Tori (OC) - I'm... still going back and forth between changing their hair to silver or keeping it blonde. Regardless, drew them in this fun shirt I saw a while back since I already had the sketch for it.
I think the back and forth with rendering styles made me re-think how I wanted to render my art as a whole. Maybe I'm thinking too much about it. In any case, a new style to mess around with!
Original Works
I've also had issues getting back into original works for similar reasons. Creating Mars has really helped me with that. There's a requirements to making his design (making sure he fits in with DnD's 5th edition rules, making sure I didn't pick a species that could fly, even creating his stats and trying to understand that) that helped to challenge me creatively. I gave myself the personal requirement of making the character an anthropomorphic animal.
Mars is my second ever TTRPG character. I have RPed in the past but never in real life and verbally. It's still something I'm getting used to but I'm having fun. Funnily enough, Mars is also short old person like Auiak, my first TTRPG character. They're also a similar flavor of "old person" (stoic and observant), though Mars is more comedic (he's very much a "I'll roll with it since it's funny" type of guy). It's going to be interesting when I have to use him in combat though, as the campaign Auiak was in had no combat. And so I have no TTRPG combat experience...!
I still can't believe the bird rolled a Nat 1 in Animal Handling...! In his introduction no less...!
I feel like they'd be good friends though.
This Website!
One last thing to mention for this reflection is this very website! Technically, I created this site in April of last year (though, technically I pushed out the final-ish site in November). Coding's a fun little beast.
I've learned to code in HTML during middle school and high school. We had a unit where we'd make our own website. I always loved it but, well, there wasn't really a way to deploy it. Funnily enough, the websites I was coding didn't center my art but my interests.
It feels weird to make something that encapsulates both me and my art. I went back and forth with presentation. Originally, this site was actually going to be more complicated with more images floating around. I adjusted it to work around accessibility as best I can. I think I like it more this way. The code definitely needs work. I have a good feeling that it's not coded optimally (I know for sure, you will have a field day if you look at the horrors I've created with art). Learning and understanding JavaScript is still something on my bucketlist. Once I get that down, hopefully I'll be able to fix these issues.
Despite the struggles and flaws, little me would be so happy. It feels very surreal to have my site floating around on the indie web. It makes me happy to see what others have done and leave little messages in their guestbook. It makes me happy seeing my site listed in webrings and fanlistings. It feels so surreal to see folks list my site on their "links out" pages. If you're one of the folks who has and has gotten this far in the blog, thank you! Words fail to express how much it means to me ❤
Social Events
During the year, I went to a few zine events for the first time. It was a lovely experience. I'm someone who's more distant and quiet (even online) and going to these events made me feel so happy that I talked to nearly all of the vendors there. It was also really nice seeing the vendors talking with each other. The atmosphere was just lovely!
I currently don't have the spoons now, but I'd love to highlight some zines I've gotten later down the line.
I think it was genuinely one of the first times where I wanted to meet other artists, maybe, even, set up my own booth like that down the line. I feel very "at home." I never got that feeling when I walked through artist alleys at anime conventions personally. I think this has to do with my own personal relationship with fandom and art as a whole. It'll definitely be a while before I try my hand at boothing. I still feel like I need to make a few more comics and zines but also do some research and prep myself for the responsibility of it.
Similarly, I joined an artist meetup in the summer. I also enjoyed it, though admittedly I felt a little out of place with the type of art I made. I'm probably just overthinking it though. The people I met there were lovely and I'd love to go again. I do see some other events coming up as well. I've made some arts for some friends (many of which were in a comissions-like format, which did leave me to think of the potential of opening commissions). I'm more hesitant on opening commissions though just due to how my autism/ADHD manifests. We'll see though.