2015 Recap

Today is the last day of 2015! Overall 2015 has been a pretty good year, and certainly a very busy year for me! First I'm going to recap my art progression for this year.

Here you can see what each month looked like.

And as you may have noticed, this year I was able to keep up (for the most part) with my daily characters! The summer was a little tough to keep up on because of work, but that doesn't mean I didn't draw SOMETHING every day.

But the year started off as my final semester at CCAD, which was definitely my best semester. Not only did I graduate in May, but I also released the demo for my game Detective Ragger (you can download that here).

A month after I graduated, I had the amazing opportunity to work at iD Tech Camp in Seattle, Washington. I loved Seattle and it's probably my favorite place that I've been so far. I met tons of new people and made lots of new friends. It was my best camp experience so far, that's for sure.

After camp was over, I bought myself a cintiq with the money I earned over the summer. It has helped me grow a lot artistically, and helps keep me motivated to work on projects. Definitely the best investment I have ever made. I noticed how much my art has improved from having a cintiq, so I'm really glad that I went through and finally made the purchase.

And in addition to my daily characters that I've been doing all year, I've also been keeping up and doing a lot more daily projects since I got back from camp. September was mostly a month to get back in the groove of working on things, but after that, I stared up daily projects. I participated in Inktober (for October), Huevember (for November), and Digicember (for December). So I've been keeping myself busy on my own projects. I usually only spend about 30 minutes to an hour (at most) on these daily projects so I don't get burnt out.

But in addition to those projects, ever since I came home in late August, I have been doing daily fundamental drawings. I haven't been posting those here because they're just for myself as a means of practice. I'm trying to better my abilities, and practicing the fundamentals is definitely what I found I needed to do. I have been doing an hour of fundamental drawing every single day since August. I've been doing them on scrap paper so I don't have to spend money on sketchbooks, so here's my pile of what I've got done so far:

 

And in addition to all of the practice that I've been doing, I've also been working as a freelance artist. I haven't been able to post any of the projects yet because of contracts, but when I do have the opportunity to, I will for sure. I just finished up a 2 minute animation project for a client earlier in December, so since then I've been working on smaller-scale projects to kind of slow down for the holidays.

But as I mentioned above, 2015's been super busy but I grew a lot! Both artistically and as a person. After graduation, it's been hard to keep in contact with everyone, but I've been at least catching up with some of my closest friends fairly often. It's tough not living with them, but I'm sure I'll be able to someday in the future. Now's just the time to save up money until I am able to afford living in another area.

I'm happy with how 2015 turned out overall though. I remember being super worried about what would happen after graduation, but I've been hanging in there and trying to take some time to relax and enjoy life. I don't want to overwork myself, but it's good to keep working on stuff every day in addition to taking some time for myself. Things have been going well, so I'm excited about what else is to come!