Reflection #81 – December + January 25

It’s the new year and it’s already been crazy!

Two weeks ago, Musk let out his Nazi parole, making it really easy for me to leave Twitter for good. Ironic how I stated never to be political on the platform to not be sucked into a bubble to then leave for political reasons… But ya, given the platform was going downhill since Elon bought it, I just needed a reason to turn my back on it.

Which has me started to express my thoughts on deviantart as well. With their re-dressing Eclipse, generative AI backing and monetization of said images, this site alienated me more and more. With every artwork I upload on the site, I always have a slimy grimy feeling they are using it to feed their AI despite having us opt-out of it long ago. Even with glazing my artworks, it never felt good to upload things since. I’m saying, of the few platforms that I’m on, DeviantArt will probably be the next one I’m distancing myself from. To be frank, the only reason I still like to use it is to use its journal features directly for my website’s blog.

And I’m sorry that on veery January Reflection, I keep bringing up my discomfort with AI but I can’t help it as it’s a pressing issue that’s still not properly adressed.

Anyway, let’s start recapping the last two months.

In the first week of December, I visited the nearest town in Switzerland with a fellow art friend and we checked out a local art museum, which was very entertaining and informative. I’m not shy to visit museums in general but specifically art museums, I haven’t visited in so very long. The last time was probably still before corona times, so yeah, feels like a very long time now, doesn’t it?

It was definitely a relaxed month for me – I took enough time to go out with friends, visit the local christmas market (something I haven’t done the previous years), bake cake, go ice-skating and go to a concert with my dad c:

Still, I had quite a lot to do. I began taking feedback from my new animation professor and focused on working on just that for a while, doing voice recording sessions with my two lovely friends RyftRiot and DiamondJack. Prior the feedback meetings, it was a wide mix of different projects taking time away from each other instead of making decent progress. In addition, I tried to squeeze in shorter, more compact courses to minimize the workload on different projects in the near future. Now, I’m more confident, to be able to finish the short film in the upcoming semester.

Christmas preparations were only lightly stressful as I had a nice plan to make small but sweet gifts for my close relatives. I had nice holidays as well and up to my birthday, it was very relaxed. Maybe I was a tad too lazy since I had to prepare my booth for Furvester but luckily, I didn’t have nearly as much to do than the year before when it was my first time.

Furvester was nice! It was definitely less stressful this time, my booth build-up wasn’t on my birthday and I had plenty of time in and out of the dealer’s den. Though I spent most of it doing commissions and some card-playing too!

Sadly, I got a little sick right on time for the new year’s eve fireworks TvT

Furvester really is a lovely place to start boothing, everyone is friendly and forward, you got plenty of time to prepare and tear down your booth, you got breaks in between and of course the staff is lovely ^v^ My most humble thanks to the people at work <3

Though once more, there was no time to really ‘attend’ the convention… something that NFC hopefully will fix very soon!

Before I headed back to my uni place, I was invited into a fellow fur’s lovely home to spend some time doing arts, I met lovely people and was sad to leave early to catch my train.

January was filled with work, mostly the aniamtion project but also Commission work and miscellaneous stuff. The second weekend in particular was overwhelming, spending most time at LIFCO, preparing a birthday gift to attend to the party the next day, managing voice recordings and finishing the raffle prize. It sounds nice and all but socially, that week had drained me and I didn’t get any rest and alone time. It felt draining and the next day, I fell ill naturally. It taught me not to dive head-in to every social gathering I could without any proper rest and that’s something I have to keep in mind – I want to be able to listen and respect this feeling more to crave some alone time. The following weekend, I did some final recording session – well hopefully, at least, since I didn’t have the time to listen tothe recordings yet.

Because I short-handedly jumped in a film-project from uni to help with set-audio recording – something I haven’t done before. It was a thrilling yet exhausting project… one that isn’t over. I’m just writing this journal in the middle of a break from it. The next 4 days will be more of that but after, I’m hopefully, all set for the next semester to be just animation and animation only.

But yeh, I haven’t showed any pictures so far, let’s see some works I’ve done!

As I mentioned before, I started drawing traditionally with a new marker set – markes by Ohuhu specifically and so far, I’ am very happy with them. It’s always so much fun to start rendering these drawings. It’s definitely challenging to not screw up a drawing with one wrong stroke but it sorta makes it exciting also and the focus you have to give each piece is sort-of meditating for me. Only the paper has been some trouble so far, I dunno why but the narrow format and smooth surface makes it hard for me to draw. At least the last two artworks I made, were relatively easy so I’m positive to be able to adabt soon. So far I wanted to make one every weekend but haven’t been consistent due to my recent film work. We’ll see what the future provides!

Each month, I was able to finish a commission and this one was very challenging. I loved to dive in, though. the neon-futuristic style and unique blacklight-kind-of rendering was something wholly new to me and I think I managed to balance the many things going on in this piece well. At first I was going for a sort-of fish-eye optic to show off the height of the platform while keeping a good skyline and still presenting the characters well. It doesn’t work right but at least all people I asked liked the attempt and don’t think the perspective takes anything away from the piece, my clients were also very happy which is something I can’t live without c:

Still, I was grinding myself out on this project pretty much. The perspective and the city scene didn’t help much and the detailed outfits took some time… though I was aware of the focus on fashion with this one and I accepted the challenge and am very happy with the result ^v^

Then in January, I was happy that my friend Shrike wanted a comm and even wanted to feature me in it! ^v^ Thepricing was very flexible, on a pay-what-you want basis and we agreed on this framing, I added some additional background detail because it was lots of fun ^v^

At first the background had me worried, because I never figured out how exactly it would look like. So I just fleshed out the scene and kept the rendering minimal to keep the focus with the characters on the colours. The sketchy feel was fun to implement and I think it really works nicely with added detail in the back. Just now, I also feel I lack on the perspective again. I should do some practices with interior and exterior shots and build on them with organic shapes I think. One more thing for the to-do list!

Alright, future projects:

As of now, I have no active private project. I could start to work out the lagoon sketch here:

But I haven’t decided on who the character is gonna be… if I can’t make up my mind, I’ll just put Myself there c:

Other than that, I wouldn’t start any more projects before NFC starts, maybe it’d be smart to invest more time in traditional drawing to maybe do some comms there to compensate for my horrendous travel costs <v<

But animations will have to stay in focus for now. I want to start doing Moho tutorials at the very beginning of March to gain more range in what animations I can produce. Also, today we at uni want to go to Annecy film festival this summer and until then, I gotta learn the basics of French at least :3

Oki! That should be all for now, this journal is long enough as is…

I’m gonna eat a bit and play some Balatro until I have to head out again. Wish you all a nice February! <3

Cheers!

~Souvillaine