It’s the end of the year! (Inside: A bit of everything, mostly drawing)
Hello hello,
I have been thinking about this newsletter for a few weeks, wondering if I should do a big roundup of everything I’ve done this year - or something even more ambitious, an abridged version of my creative endeavors since I started being more “serious” about art four years ago.
Turns out I do not have the energy to do that. So I’ll just show you what I’ve been doing since the last time I wrote.
I think everyone reading this probably knows who I am, but just in case you forgot - I'm Julien, an artist of no renown. If you click my name you'll go to my website, which I updated recently! I think it looks pretty cool and shiny!
Hades
The game of my heart. I’ve spent over 100 hours playing Hades (the Nintendo Switch version), and countless more thinking about the characters and drawing them. Over the last month I’ve colored a lot of the Hades drawings I showed you in the last newsletter (digitally! on the computer!), and I think I’m starting to get a little more intuitive sense for digital coloring!
This is probably not the last you will see from me of these characters.
More character art
I started out with Hades characters, but I've been in a real character-drawing mood. I drew a few of my own original characters (!!!), from two different story ideas. The first three:
And two more, in mockup-videogame-screenshot form:
It's kind of exciting to think about and design my own characters, even if it's uncertain to what extent I'll follow up on their stories.
Towards the end of November/beginning of December I read Tamsyn Muir's Gideon The Ninth and Harrow The Ninth, and really fell in love with some of the characters. Here are four of them:
I also did a fair amount of figure drawing practice. I think I'm improving, but it's slow going sometimes. I would really love to be able to do more quick, casual character sketches, and the only way to get there is to practice more! It can be frustrating to not be better at drawing now, but I'm getting less impatient. I have done way more art in the past year than I ever have in the past, and it has finally helped me see that getting to where I want to be as an artist is going to happen over the course of years, not weeks or months. And it's going to be a meandering path, because that's just who I am.
Further digital experimentation
Speaking of meandering paths, all the digital coloring I did at the end of November made me decide it was FINALLY time to get an iPad and figure out a digital art workflow that I enjoyed - I haven't done much purely digital art since 2017, when I first learned to use photoshop. (You can see those old drawings if you go back through my Tumblr... here's one, two, three, four that I was proud of at the time.)
I've only been using it for a few days at this point, but here are a few of my initial experiments doodling Pokemon and painting some typical landscapes.
And for posterity, an attempt at a portrait of my beautiful wife Leah, from the farming video game Stardew Valley:
Like I was saying before, I'm not yet happy with my quick-and-casual character sketching. But hopefully I'll look back on this in the future and feel happy with my progress.
I had the beginnings of an art existential crisis when I first started playing with iPad-drawing, wondering what the point of it really was, and feeling that nagging doubt that I should be focusing on improving at the things I'm already good at rather than learning yet another medium. But that feeling quickly subsided, mostly because at the end of this year I don't really have the energy for existential crises anymore. For that matter, I don't even have much energy for goals - yes, I still want to get some traditional paintings into a gallery, at some point. I'd love to build up some basic illustration and character/location design skills (I guess that's what the digital practice is for). I wouldn't mind selling crafts at a convention or in an online shop sometime. But I'm sure I'll work on all of that in due time. For now I'm satisfied just doing whatever I feel like.
One last painting of 2020!
I said at the end of the big newsletter with all the paintings that I would probably continue plodding along with paintings at a slower pace for the rest of the year... and then proceeded to not do that. I thought I might not do any more paintings at all, but I surprised myself last week by busting out a little snowy brook scene that I was pretty pleased with.
I think that's a nice way to end this newsletter and the year. See you on the other side.
Julien