🎄 December report

Happy end-of-2025! I hope your holidays have gone well. I’ll just get right to it for this last monthly report.

December goals:
✔︎ Commission progress (2/4)
✔︎ Upload archives/backlog

✔︎ Upload archives/backlog

I’m starting with this one, because I decided, actually, not to touch the remainder of works in the vault and felt an immediate sense of relief for it. Thank you for putting up with me as I dug through these pieces.

✔︎ Commission progress (2/4)

Commissions! They’re coming together. I didn’t finish all of them like I ideally wanted to, but I did make progress on every single one, and it feels nice to be able to see that.

Going forward, I do definitely want to focus on sketch comms for the time being. I LOVE inking, and I enjoy playing with colours, but I’m just unable to deliver that sort of work consistently, and the guilt of it eats away at me. Sketch comms are my compromise.

That said, THANK YOU to all my commissioners who have been so patient and never once compounded on that guilt. I’ve never been a particularly fast artist, but this year has been such a struggle, and it was nice to only ever be met with support when I returned with an overdue update. Everyone has such fun characters, and I love getting to know them.

2025 retrospective..?

I would’ve liked to do some sort of yearly retrospective, but I just didn’t really do much this year. I was incredibly depressed! I still am! Even what little character creation and development I did do doesn’t have any visuals to go with it. Let’s just move on:

2026 Resolutions:

◻︎ Focus on sketches - Constantly aiming for finished work has put a lot of pressure and strain on me, so I’m paring back for loose drawing, minimal colour, studies… generally speaking, work I can get done on my iPad.

◻︎ More personal work - I didn’t really do much purely for myself this year, which contributed to my burnout. What this likely means is I’ll focus on Scabbardfish for a while, since they’re highly self-contained and self-indulgent. Hopefully that will allow me to return to my main cohort (Aster, Coinneach, and their setting) with renewed energy. I’d also like to get references drawn for everyone, but we shall see!

◻︎ Harder push for writing - I want to make some genuine progress on at least one of the stories I have floating around in my head. Less time stressing over art means more opportunity to write (theoretically), and I squandered too much of that this year. There may not be any visibly public progress for this resolution, but I hope I’ll get something out of it.

◻︎ Not really a resolution, but I’ll be reducing monthly reports to quarterly reports. I don’t really do enough to have much to say every month, and it feels like a lot of effort for something I doubt people are all that interested in. If you do read these, even when I tend to ramble, well then, hey, thanks for being here. I hope you like whatever I manage next year.

Wishing you a pleasant 2026!

– Léo

Top […] this year:

books: Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin; The Tide Child trilogy by RJ Barker
movies: Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962); Ikiru (1952); The 400 Blows (1959); Some Like It Hot (1959); The Ascent (1977)
new albums: The Blue Nowhere by Between the Buried and Me; Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan by The Mountain Goats; Rathlin from a Distance | The Liquid Hour by Yann Tiersen