Annual Reflection #7 – 2024

Cough, Sniff.

Eugh, I’m a little sick at the moment, just a minor cold at least, nothing to worry about but regardless something that was straining my energy for the past couple of days.

In my last annual reflection, I’ve been describing 2023 as a year of definition, one that has tempered me to better socialize and support myself. This year was one of challenge and opportunity. One to further develop what I had started before.

Right off the bat, I knew it was going to be tight with my finances. While I receive support from my family, I received much less and on top of that, I had more expenses, leaving me in a difficult position. Since all of my expenses had to be balanced, I decided to spread out my income monthly to see how I could manage with the approach of earning a living at the side of my school.

Since my first time vending at a convention went rather unfruitful – at least counting the many expenses I had to get started – I basically jumped at every possibility to earn money in January: opening commissions, asking around, offering to ship some of my wares to friends and participating in an online convention called Little Island Furry Con, which – let’s face it – didn’t do a thing to boost my finances but on the flipside was a lot of fun! I spent around 12 hours in voice chats with people, doodled with artists and just chatted with people from around the world like it was an actual on-site fur con. It was a little help not to just see income with events and go there for the people and the fun socializing.

Practically the whole of the first quarter of the year had me worried anything would become of my ventures to make it on my own, luckily two commissions and my position to assist with the Animation Festival in Stuttgart helped ease that fear. However, there is no understating that these few months would be a taste of the sheer workload that waited for me.

One of my favourite pieces this year was made in february: the Cheese – Loving Harpy:

A commission by a friend I met at Eurofurence 2023. Brainstorming this was hard as I barely have made much character designs these days but working on the piece itself was liberating and fun. I’m very happy with the overall composition, the way the smoke helps separating the cheese from the harpy’s arm and create a much more intense focal point. I love the detail on the rooftop and the limited but well used colours in this. And it just makes me happy to look at it! ^)v(^ 

This year marked a new look for my main character and persona: I spent lots of time refining the already established look and put it into the tropical island setting.

Sadly, I had to neglect my last year’s resolution of visualizing a lovely Caribbean setting. While it started nicely with some unique animal and vegetation concepts, I had to put it aside for all the other projects I had going on that year. At least I’m still feeling as vibrant and fruity as ever. I want to do more in this region and will try to work out something even if it’s just on the side.

The summer semester has probably been the most excessive work-heavy time since my study has started. Apart from finishing a whopping 9 courses to get the mandatory stuff out of the way, I was also working for the animation festival, doing product designs for Eurofurence, participating in Artfight and volunteering in the graphics department for Tropical Furry Islands. And guess what, I regretted none of it!  

Now in retrospect, I believe this semester has been my favourite so far because of all the uni stuff I could move out of the way to later focus on projects and feeling very progressive with all that I didn’t do for uni.

It helped a lot that here in that region, we have a small beach rather secluded and – during normal work hours – rarely ever visited. I regularly went there to lay in the sun and get my mind off the stress. Another positive outcome in this time was to get more traditional drawing utensils. I was inspired by the old People Sketching Videos by Will Terell, who worked with ink and markers on brown paper and used white highlights to make them pop.

I decided to keep up my efforts to strengthen my traditional skills and regularly practice to offer those at Eurofurence to give me an additional motivation to push through with my resolution. And I have since become much more acquainted with the medium, even procured around 30 drawings this year (14 of which are commissions I accepted at cons). I still have to fully figure out how to properly balance shading and skin tones but I’m getting better to reach a good-looking balance.

With my annual fruit hat piece, I started to record my work process in Clip Studio Paint and released my first of 6 timelapse videos on my youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@souvillaine5131). I also gathered a lot of happy faces regarding it at conventions… some recognized the reference right away ^)v(^ 

Luckily, with Tropical Furry Islands, I found a way to mandatory include my affection towards the tropical setting into my schedule. For the first time, I was there to create actual key-art for a convention: meaning Lanyard Backgrounds, Team Buttons, Sticker and Shirt. I got a glimpse into the official production process and the making and gathering of resources to make the con experience as good as possible for guests and staff. 

I’m happy I get to do the same again this year.

Artfight, though, has not been as enjoyable as last year… which is fine because of how little time I had. Overall, I’m not too happy with the quality of arts I produced. I think I was leaning too much on the original designs instead of enjoying my artistic freedom and experimenting more with style and roughness.

However, I was able to create a small comic again as tribute to a friend’s glorious efforts in creating his own comic… it did help also that his Birthday is during the ArtFight event  

Finally, it’s TFI.

And it is all I had hoped for. The convention at Tropical Islands is a bliss. It feels like proper vacation for a change. I get to experience germany’s biggest water park and Genuine (though tempered) Rainforest altogether with a furry con joining it. The only thing I regret is not bringing any Volleyballs or a swim ring but that’s already on the list for next time as I’m so stoked for it! Even moreso because this time it’s so close after Eurofurence and a day longer, meaning some extra vacation experience.

Oh yes, speaking of EF….

It was a huge step-up from Furvester – my first time vending – of course. This time I had more products and a newly designed booth. Overall I’d say it was too stressful for my own good up until vending started and calmness settled in. While I really enjoyed my time there, I felt the lack of free time gnawing on me and income didn’t look too swell either. Regardless, I’ll try to apply for next year’s EF as well just with how much better Furvester felt a few weeks ago. What both of these conventions had in common was that I had more time to step out of my booth and chat with the other artists from time to time because I could anticipate when relatively few visitors were walking about. I’ll only have to find a way to manage my time for commissions better so I can actually spend some time not doing anything work related and enjoy myself more. The convention didn’t actually go as planned either, so hopefully this year, it’ll be more time to settle down, it’s a plus that most of my arrangements to actually set up a proper booth are met now.

My time in the summer vacation between going to the North of Germany with my mom, Tropical Furry Islands and Eurofurence is spent with moving. Yes, actual moving oh I haven’t mentioned it now have I? <v<

I was very uncomfortable in my last living arrangement just because of the state of the housing and how you basically played roulette every time a new person settled in. I lost at the roulette game and the last months of living in there were a certain someone was present were hellish. I’m glad I moved out and found a much more comfortable place with much better company now.

Returning back from my semester break had me join right back in to the new semester where one thing was clear: I had to urgently get back to working on my projects that I had to neglect prior. At first, I was about to work on my animation project, my game project and my graphic design project simultaneously but upon working myself into Godot, I realized just how difficult this game would be. I was doing tutorials then and even invested my time doing a few of Brilliant’s coding courses but none really helped.

It was then that I quite impulsively agreed to help with a furry game jam just hoping to get something out of actually working in the Engine… sadly though, I was mainly just very busy working on graphics and barely even looking into the actual code of the game. At least it really helped me to get into actual game development again be it just for a week and getting a sweet little project out of it as well ^v^

It was a meeting with our new animation professor that actually had me switch my priorities and completely focus on my neglected animation project, merely through his expertise and supporting words. I’ll try to step up my efforts with it to make it as presentable as possible in order to have it add to my portfolio. It is imperious that I get an internship next winter semester and increase my skillset in animation until then.

In 2024, I had high costs due to simply being 25 years old, with the high expenses setting up my vending booth and unexpected costs that threw me out of balance. All this and additional cost of inflation will make the year 2025 no less challenging but at least I already have a strong foundation to lean on. Of course you can never expect a change of plans you haven’t accounted with but I think it’s fair to assume it’s a work-heavy year as well and hopefully one that will bring more opportunities as well.

Overall, 2024 was a year to hone my skills, to further grow as a person and be challenged in difficult situations and I can safely say that I made some wonderful new acquaintances that will hopefully continue walking with me for a long while in the foreseeable future.

The next big step for me will be to travel to Sweden in February and attend Nordic Fuzz con – my first time being a sole visitor – and a good little vacation to meet up with friends that I haven’t seen again since my very first furry con all the way back in 2022… which already feels like half a decade…

Alright this shall be it for this Annual Reflection.

I will give more detailed descriptions on how Furvester went and how the Christmas time went by in my next monthly reflection.

I sincerely wish this year to be a good one and would love to hear from you what you’d like to do or achieve!

With Love,

~ Souvillaine