Reflexion #68 – October 23

Eeeey happy past Halloween!

My head hurts TvT

This was a busy one for me. It was foreseeable though:

Building up my furvester dealer’s den experience with custom designs for stickers, buttons, postcards and more was sort of overwhelming. Mainly because I barely spaced out my personal work time thus stuffing everything in this one month. Every day, I spent working on designs and preparing them for print. with sometimes more, sometimes less desirable results. I feel like going through each of them for a bit:

Lanyards:

I worked on them first and they proved to be a pleasant experience up until I had to convert my file to CMYK and at least one of my designs got busted pretty bad. It is a real shame it doesn’t work well with my favourite colour scheme. The next projects were all made with a CMYK preview installed while working.

Buttons:

They were fairly easy to work with and I enjoyed the change to my usual illustrations. It was less character based and could be experimented with fairly freely. I think I managed to pull off some very neat designs that I may be able to improve on with some holo effects from the manufacturer, although that is a whole different kind of headache to deal with.

Stickers:

For my previous designs, I all choose the subject matter on the thought of: “would I want to wear this? – yes! absolutely!” but with stickers, I’ve always had the issue that I never really used any. And that proved to be difficult, especially when imagining someone has got to pay for them.

All of them are figure based so that challenged me even more, turning a sticker design into much bigger of a process than lanyards or buttons.

Postcards:

Were the hardest to make because they basically are mini-illustrations that ought to be fit for sending them away to people. I have made an overall 5 concepts but only 2 of them, I managed to finish, because I was displeased with the rest.

I still have to find a style fit for ‘cute’ or ‘relatable’ content, and if you are looking through my gallery, you can tell how a consistent style is something I have failed to achieve.

I truly hope that this big endeavour will contribute to ‘finding myself’ in the midst of so many attempts to capture the essence of my creative efforts.

But I know that this is something I need to strive towards, because the need to earn my living is constantly pressuring me and not pursuing this opportunity would only make things even more difficult.

Anyway, I will see the fruits of this labour in the following month. And I am already positive that turning this craft into something physical can boost my morale and make pursuing this sort of salesmanship worthwhile. It is all very exciting to say the least!

Going on with more personal matters:

I have moved at the start of this month and returned to university routine. Things start to normalize and socializing with friends and study-mates has been refreshing and soul-calming to me. While the pressure of the courses piles on on my already existing projects, I also feel the need to really get to work and produce something I can present and be proud of.

My biggest passion, so far is in the animation sector though and I am thrilled to get back to animating and telling stories that move to move.

Sadly though, my aforementioned personal design projects with tight deadlines have prevented me to pursue as much as I wanted to. I did take my free time here and there but the need to ‘get back to work’ was often times taking a toll on my attitude.

I feel like there’s an endless amount to talk about but I want to get quickly to my one illustration I can show this month:

It was clear that I didn’t have much time to do anything personal, but October, being October kinda forced me to produce at least one sort-of spook-themed artwork. Brainstorming in the back of my head was fruitless at first and towards the end of the month, a second deadline crept up on me: the opportunity to submit something to the Furvester Con Book. Making it into the EF con book was a very fulfilling experience to give something to the community and being recognized for it, so I really wanted to do that again with this much more personal little convention. Though, the last pic was so much work that it felt too much to handle, plus the theme: ‘Mad Science’ was soemthing I never thought, I could work with.

BUT It seemed to work out for me once I tried to connect my two projects. It was very limiting in a way, but I actually ended up producing several concepts that helped me turn it down and work with the time constraints, make it simple and land between silly and spooky that fit the theme as well as the Halloween vibe. After a day or so of planning (among other things) I managed to finish this in 4 days with some personal downtime and work on an important sticker.

I’m not too pleased with the result but it’s fine for what I had to work with.

I wonder how November will look like. I have got about two comms on a waiting list, which covers my illustrations this and next month probably. Still, I’d be interested if I could manage to get an all colourful and expressive episode out like last year that lasted for about 2 months.

On the side, I will finish some more designs for FV, work on an animation project and some more uni stuff.

I’ve gotten a bit exhausted now and think I should rest a little before going on. Maybe finally checking my social media feed…

In the meantime, have a very pleasant month of November! The year is almost over… oh boy.

Enjoy yourselves!

~Souvillaine