December Week 2 Reflection!

It's definitely been an exciting month for me so far. I feel like I have found my brand/stride with Youtube and at the same time, I am seeing pretty nice results with my artwork. 

With Youtube, I finally feel like I have found my voice (literally lmao). Sharing my artwork and my journey while encouraging/inspiring others is really all it is. I want to lean into that with all of the unique qualities of mine such as being soothing, thoughtful, motivational, relatable, etc. I love reading when people comment that my words came at a perfect time. I really enjoy the thought that there are people out there putting in the hours, listening to my videos as a little bit of support, just like I have with so many other artists over the years. I still feel big urges to avoid falling off, losing relevance, not being interesting enough but I have to push through them and take the risk. Its how I started everything but I never seemed to realize what I had until I lost it. So many great things are just natural without effort. So far things are doing well!

With art, I am going to continue with the recent decision I have made in November to focus less on practicing, and just make cool stuff. Like I always say, its best to balance your studies by working on projects that you find interesting to you. I have spent the entirety of last year working so hard on improving that I didn't spend the time discovering what makes me love art. Now that I have, its even clearer how important both of these parts are to improving your overall skills. I hoped to have more frequent transitions from study time, to cool artwork making time, but honestly I don't think its a bad idea not to. Part of me yearns to pump out alot of work next year and begin to share it with my fans/audience for once. 

That brings me to some of my goals for next year! I really want to make big strides towards having an artbook and do SOMETHING at a convention. I don't really know what yet since I still want to plan it as a vacation trip, not a business one. I don't expect to sell anything, but I still want to enjoy the experience of it so I have to figure out what costs I'll have to eat. As far as an artbook goes, I want to have all of my most unique work organized in chronological order and do a sort of 'book one' for my pink/vibrant colored artworks. I think the best way to start that would be through something like a kickstarter so I can go all out without worrying about failure. 

I am looking forward to finishing the artwork above, its something where I combined using reference and imagination again to some success. I am also referencing Ilya Kuvshinov pretty significantly here for the hair and skin shading. I think I'll pick him for the style breakdown for this month! As for the last Training Tier tutorial, I plan to do the top vote from last time going over my general approach to a new artwork from start to finish. I think I'll make another poll soon to see what type of work I have done recently everyone is most interested in seeing me break down. 

Have a great weekend!

-Josh