It's finally the end of 2020! This has been a crazy year, as I'm sure it has been for many people. But there were some really great things that came from it as well, so it's been a rollercoaster of a year for sure! Art and personal projects have been a bit of a struggle, but life, in general, has been improving overall.
Here's a summary of this year's art:
At the beginning of the year, I started out by participating in OC Art Trades over on deviantART, which was a fun way to draw characters that weren't my own while making people happy. It was a lot of fun, but unfortunately, once deviantART changed to Eclipse, it really took that project down, as the website is no longer optimized for Groups, and the founder of the Group had to step down. This happened around May, when everything else in the world got crazy.
My friends and I decided to start creating art for an OC Trading Card Game, which we plan to eventually make into a real game once we finish the art.
I made some progress on The Nays like writing more of Rocko's past and leading up to the Ginko Eventure (that we still haven't written yet).
There was a period in the summer when I was doing a bit more NADs again, so I could get some of the more main characters (along with side ones, as usual) drawn that I usually miss in the summer.
RPG Maker MZ came out in the summer, so I had a lot of fun working on new test projects in that and reminiscing on old RPG Maker games that I had made in the previous engines. And then in August, I did a bunch of Nay Events.
In October, I did OCtober as my Inktober prompt. And then for the next few months, I worked on illustrating an Eventure that my brother wrote, and turned it into a gift for him on Christmas. It's published and online here!
Towards the end of the year, during my break, I started to get back into game design and learning. I made a 3D platformer test to teach myself Unity. And then I started on a 2D fighting game that I've been wanting to make for awhile. I'm still not sure if it'll be in Unity, Game Maker, or something else, but it's a project I've had in mind for awhile now.
So overall, I've worked on a few various projects, and now that I lay it all out, it feels like more than it did at the time, which is good!
In my personal life, I've made a lot of transitions as well. When everything went crazy in spring, my work also drastically changed to keep up with the times. I worked a lot of overtime over the summer and did a lot of professional development. This included coaching people, making big decisions, managing a massive Discord server, and basically touching every course we have to some degree. I even got to do more art with our 2D animation course and Roblox projects. So it's been a lot of learning and growing.
Outside of work, I had some rough times in my personal life towards the beginning of the year, so after seeking out some help, I was inspired to finally move out of that situation. In the summer, I did virtual visits to apartments with my best friend, and eventually, we found a place we loved. And in September, I finally moved out of my parents' house and into my very own apartment in Columbus!
I thought it was crazy to be moving into my first apartment during a pandemic, but it ended up being the right choice, and I'm so much happier now than I used to be. The downside has been that it's been harder to work on writing more of The Nays, living far apart from my brother, but we make it work during visits, and I'm sure I'll come up with some kind of system once I'm more situated in a more normal year.
This year, in terms of art, I didn't really worry about daily art or posting my art online as much as I used to, because I wasn't necessarily creating art to post anymore this year. That's why Blogger has turned into a place where I really want to focus more on processes, and posts like this one, where I don't really have "daily posts". That's what my deviantART, Instagram, and Discord are for. I've been realizing I want to focus less on my social media presence, and more on learning new skills and working towards developing The Nays' story. Blogger just doesn't seem like the right platform for posting daily like I used to, and it felt redundant to share those blog posts to the websites that I already posted daily to. So I kind of want this platform to be its own place, and that's why I'm really deciding to repurpose it overall.
But that's been the year! It's been a crazy one for sure, and a lot has been going on. While I don't know if I improved much specifically in art, I do know that I've grown a lot as a person, gained some professional skills, and learned a lot of new things. So it's been a crazy year, but honestly not so bad, considering what's going on in the world.
