☘️ March report

With my attention focused elsewhere, I didn’t get much of anything done on this front, and I find myself terribly exhausted – facing burnout, really.

Drawing for this account fell to the wayside. Commissions, personal doodles, sketches, all of it – my priority was with other work and dealing with a health issue. I don’t actually find myself regretful over this, though part of me feels I should. I love the work I was able to do for my other account, I love the media analysis and character dev I’ve done in the background, and I had to get this surgery done before things became even more of a problem than they already were.

Aside from that, for much of this month, I found myself desperately, repeatedly, bitterly desiring a break. I may have to enforce that through an hiatus effective immediately. I doubt anyone here wants me drawing anything while resentful and exhausted.

Regrettably, that does mean I’ll continue to leave this pinup of Ares unfinished. As soon as I returned home from surgery, I knew this was going to be the case, but it does leave me a little disappointed.

While I wasn’t drawing, I did manage to dig into some movies and books that have informed a few projects I have stewing. I find, lately, my passions are more easily reignited outside of drawing, and it feels it’s been an age since I delved into my own work with a clear and discerning intent. It gives me some hope I’ll make genuine progress on these stories.

If anyone would like the actual titles I’ve been digesting recently, here’s a list presented without comment: Les quatres cents coups (1959); Le Samouraï (1967); WolfWalkers (2020); Bambi by Felix Salten; The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck and Histoire de Mr. Jabot by Rodolphe Töpffer; Fire Bringer by David Clement-Davies; plus a few others I watched or read in earlier months.

🌧️ Goals for April:

◻︎ Commission progress
◻︎ Continued project development

Two vague goals, the first of which I leave beholden to my energy levels. Perhaps the spring will rejuvenate me. Signs point to my needing a break and a refreshed perspective.

Thank you for sticking around.

🌸 February report

As I predicted, last month was a bit too ambitious for me, but I’ll go through what I did manage to do:

✲ Finish commissions CM12–14
✘ Thumbs for CM15–16
✘ Shibari illustration

✲ Commission progress

Let’s just lump both commission goals together since I didn’t get thumbs done for the ones I wanted to. I am making progress. Just slowly. Slower than I’d like. And it’ll have to continue progressing slowly while I deal with health issues and other obligations. Normally if I can’t focus at my computer, I’ll use my time to work through sketches at my iPad, but things were so bad this month I couldn’t even manage that much.

I did, however, manage to finish one commission, and I’ll say again how much of a joy it was to work with texture rendering and tentacles. I’m pretty much always down to draw some tentacles, whatever they look like. Ideally, I’ll clean up a few ideas to use as tentacle YCH comms, but those are a bit low on the priority ladder.

The current commission priority? Some ropes. Another huge fave of mine.

✘ Shibari illustration

Speaking of ropes, what makes this personal piece particularly frustrating is I’ve had the sketch and rough colours figured out for a while now, and the inks are about 95% done, but I hit a snag and just haven’t had the time to get back to finish it. Honestly, at this point I may end up re-inking the entire piece again, but for now it’s just going to sit on the indefinite back-burner since I failed to meet my personal deadline.

Instead, I took some time to doodle a few silly things from ideas I’ve had penned for a few months.

Sometimes you just need to put your characters in dumb shirts, and that’s okay.

☘️ Goals for March:

◻︎ Commission progress
◻︎ Ares illustration

Slow and steady does it. I think I’ll also be officially closing commissions while I work through my current queue, and I may keep them closed for the time being. $10 supporters can still send an inquiry at any time, but this doesn’t actually apply to anyone at the moment so.