Creative Updates Project

My friends and I are starting a new project where we're planning to meet bi-weekly, or close to that frequency, to talk about whatever projects we're currently working on. This way, we can receive feedback from each other, or just generally talk about art and creative things to help motivate ourselves to work on our own personal projects. We're not sure what we're calling it yet, but we might be just sticking with our old project title of the Improvement Movement, which is still a working title! I'm going to refer to it as the Creative Updates Project here on my blog until I come up with something better though. Edit: We ended up going with that title, with the acronym of CUP, and have been referring to it as CUPdates.

I decided personally that I'd like to get back into blog posting, and so I want to make bi-weekly blog posts that go over what I'd like to present at our meetings. This will be a better way for me to collect my thoughts and have more meaningful conversations during these meet-ups. For this first one, I'm going to talk a bit about the various projects I've been working on over the past month or so.

Recently I've been dedicating Sundays to project workdays, and it's been a wide variety of whatever I feel like working on. I just finished up my #SurpriseOCDrawing project where I would sketch a character designed by someone I know and then post it and tag them. This was a fun little project I did to brighten peoples' days, because I know I get super excited whenever someone draws one of my characters. I wanted to spread that love and positivity around to artists that inspire me.

Other than that project, I've actually been doing a lot of video editing recently. It started when I watched some YouTube videos about sketchbook tours and general art advice, so I sat down one day and went through every sketchbook I had, and recorded videos of myself talking about them. I recorded at least 20 of these, but so far have edited and uploaded 5 of them. I'm planning to finish the rest someday, but it's been a fun on-going video project that motivates me to practice working in Premiere more (which I did end up doing with our 24-Hour Animation too! You can read more about that project in my previous blog post).

Here's the playlist where you can see the sketchbook tour videos that I've made so far, and one of the most recent videos here:

After drawing other people's characters and looking at their social media sites, I made a carrd page that links to all of my social media pages and can kind of act as a landing page for myself. It also inspired me to finally try out Art Station, since a few of them had accounts on there. I'm using that site as a place to showcase bigger projects and just highlight some of my best art, so it can show as more of a portfolio site.

From making my Art Station account, I also decided to create some videos to showcase my Global Game Jam projects, because I wanted to make a page for each of those. And I realized that sometimes people don't have time to play through my games, or get stuck, so I wanted a way for people to be able to see those whole games without playing them themselves, if they preferred not to. So I've been uploading those videos to my YouTube channel in this playlist. Here's one of them:

And through all of this, it's been making me reconsider my YouTube channel, in general. I never really used it very much before, but I've been working on a YouTube class for work, and it kind of inspired me to play around with playlists and how content is displayed on my channel. So I've been reworking that overall presentation a bit as well.

But going forward, I'm hoping to get back into drawing or working on games some more, like I originally planned for this year. It's been a while since I drew my own characters, so I am looking forward to getting back into that soon!