Hello and welcome to my second annual reflection where I look at the past year in retrospect and talk about my artistic journey.
It was definitely a year of change for me. It all started with preparing for my A-level exams which ate up a lot of time each day, especially Math and Economy. I had many days when I couldn’t draw at all, or couldn’t do anything except studying. And when the days where too exhausting, it felt too tiresome to work on a project… it is work after all and it needs some energy preserved for that cause. Yet I still managed to do at least one artwork every month this year, even in the busiest by far. I have held through and passed my exams and the time off I had in between them and my orals was liberating.
It wouldn’t take long for me to finally graduate and leave school behind me, moving out and into a new home to mark this point in life for me.
Of course, the shire number of artworks I finished this year was lower than in 2018. I did a count and it stood 65 to 42 although there have been some which are not published in both years. However, I really felt this lack of productivity throughout the year. I suffered through a bunch of art blocks that were all due to sketches not working out properly. Which is odd, because I managed to really step-up my sketches and the fluidity of them, I just got really picky with what I assumed would work out and what wouldn’t and scrapped such sketches without giving them enough time to develop. That’s something I hope, will be able to approach with more acceptance.
Overall, I think there was a general improvement to last year; I figured out how to use colours more efficiently, poses and composition seem more secure and I dared to show more complex and detailed backgrounds for some of my projects. Yet I can’t overlook how the graphical quality blends over the years at least sometimes. On the one side, I am happy that my one year old artworks still hold up to this day but I think I did expect more improvement throughout the year? Perhaps. I should address this in my resolutions.
Apropos; in regard to last year’s reflection, I am happy to say that I really did hold my resolutions! I kept doing character showcases and put some scenery in there on occasion. But most importantly; I managed to improve on anatomically correct figures and learned to render them with realistic looking light. My breakthrough artwork must have been Valentin – Winter Outfit [Collab]where I first succeeded at this kind of rendering. It still proved to be a challenge with furred characters but I am still figuring things out.
What I’d really be looking out to be doing in the following year is to focus more on my own characters. I have made a lot of them (12 if I remember correctly) and plenty of them still appear only once in my gallery. I’ll try to pick the old designs up and do something with them.
Also, to push my boundaries for further improvement, I wish to be doing more experiments in style and depiction… that’s about as vague as I can get, I just hope to make the most out of this aim.
Lastly, well I had this idea in mind to slowly take a step into the animation department, specifically keyframe animation. This means a lot of practice, well yeah, let’s see if this will work out x3
I think that would be it on my part. I kept things in the art department mostly but of course 2019 had many facets and plenty of them can be discussed about.
I’d be interested in your view in retrospect. How is your overall impression of the year? What did you do, what happened? And which was your favourite thing?
In any way, I wish you all a wonderful new year 2020!
~Souvillaine