Well, here we are. 2021. Time to take a look back at the year that was to gain a little perspective while planning for the year that is. I could take this post in so many different directions, and despite having a little outline of things I want to remember to cover, I’m still not sure what I’m going to write. Should I stick strictly to what goals I started 2020 with and which ones I accomplished? Should I get into some of the personal “stuff”, since that impacts and is reflected in art? Should I go by project, or by month? Should I get into the pandemic or politics?
Enough vacillating. Time to just start writing.
For the last several years, I’ve tried to get into the habit of writing up a list of creative goals for the year. I’ve learned a few things from this exercise: I do better when I break each goal down into several smaller steps (not surprising), and I both think I can get done way more than is possible in a given time frame (which also isn’t surprising, and it crops up when I’m working on house projects, too) as well as have way too many ideas fighting for attention in my Brain. My goals for 2020 were ambitious, but I thought I could get to all of them. Of course, this was before the pandemic and a whole host of other life events, but I put a lot of hurdles in my own way, too. It’s something I’ve done my whole life, and it’s something I’m constantly trying to overcome. Whether it’s never feeling like a piece is done, or that something isn’t good enough, or avoiding something because there’s a component that’s outside my comfort zone (like anything to do with finances, making money, doing something completely new, etc), or getting lost in my day dreams, or managing my time poorly because I’m often overwhelmed and paralyzed by the shear volume of “stuff” I want to do in my head that I can’t decide what to focus on and any time I do decide to focus on a particular project, I feel guilty and like I should be focusing on something else. At 43, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully get out of my own way, but I keep trying.
I started 2020 working on my first of 6 planned shirt designs for the year (you can still decorate your torso with it):
This started as a potential embroidered patch design for a karate friend’s bike club, but we went with a different image. I liked the sketch enough, and I had thought about a samurai helmet design before, that I turned it into a shirt (and potential sticker). This is another “theme” image, I have several other ideas to turn this into a series. I have always had a bit of a romanticized fascination with samurai and martial arts in general, and I have been studying karate diligently and dabbled in many other styles since 1995, but I know that historically there were a lot of darker aspects to that period of history and samurai culture.
However, the striking appearance and iconic nature of samurai armor is undeniable, and for all of it’s less pleasant aspects has come to symbolize some admirable values and virtues around the globe, such as bravery, discipline, fearlessness, and loyalty, in addition to martial prowess. The armor in general, and helmets in particular, could often be very unique and expressive, they were very much practical works of art.
This particular image is one of my own design, right down to the crests, and is not meant to be that of a particular samurai or family.
This one took a lot longer to finish than I wanted, on account of my being detail obsessed. But, I was pleased with the result, and it sparked a loose idea for future shirts. I was also somewhat simultaneously working on a logo design for a non-profit martial arts motorcycle charity that one of my karate friends was starting up. The goal was to help raise money to get karate programs into underprivileged areas. The samurai helmet was one initial idea, but I ended up going with a graphic interpretation of a famous samurai statue.
Final patch design for the charity martial arts motorcycle club, based on a famous samurai statue in Japan.
My complimentary copies of the finished patches as well as a shirt from the karate organization I began my karate journey with (which I did not design).
Sometime around this time I put together and ran several weekends of ads for both my shirts and 10 Things. I don’t think I generated any sales from that effort. I had plans to continue, but once the pandemic hit, everything went out the window. I didn’t want to be spending money on ads, and I figured there was such economic uncertainty (to say nothing of the health uncertainties) that I figured people wouldn’t be in a buying frame of mind anyway (not that I’ve ever had many sales to begin with). I also started experimenting with turning my designs into stickers, as it is a service offered by Printful, the company I use to print my shirts. The majority of the stickers I got as samples looked great, but 3 had either print issues or physical damage. I had to request free replacements 2 additional times before they got those 3 stickers right, which didn’t leave me with a lot of confidence in offering that product at the time. I know they, like so many industries, have been hampered by the pandemic, so I cut them some slack and will likely try again in 2021. I’d like to have an option for people to support my art at a lower price point than a $21 tshirt.
As the lock downs were starting and my normal schedule and routine that is mostly based on the kids, school, and scouts started to get flipped on its head, I turned to two sewing projects: a new set of hip/holster bags and a wool poncho.
This is one of a pair of bags I made in March 2020. They were supposed to be worn on the hips, like a crazy utility belt, or under the arms, like holsters. IT was some of my most ambitious sewing to that point, and they turned out okay. They just don’t function as well as I need them to in terms of being able access the gear I put in them, as well as how they function when I wear them (can’t really wear them while driving, don’t fit under a coat, don’t work well over a coat, etc). I learned some things, though.
This is the wool poncho I made with the idea of it being useful for hiking and camping. It has a hidden belt in the front and the back, so I can change and configure how I wear it (to make it more like a coat and not be in the way) and I started adding a system of snaps to also change it’s shape and length (the snaps I have aren’t strong enough, though, so I need to find better ones). The “sleeves” fold and snap along the seams, and I plan to add snaps so the bottom corners can fold in, creating a diamond shape. I wear it all the time around the house, and have hiked in it in some cool temperatures. It’s also big enough to function as a sleeping bag or a doubled over blanket. It has some sewing problems, and I’m currently thinking of improvements (which might mean a completely different garment altogether).
I decided my second shirt of the year was going to be a redraw of my original shirt, the It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo Time! shirt. PMD has evolved quite a bit over the years, so I decided it was time for an update (also, because the lack of consistency between the original shirt and the way I draw him now really bugged me. See also my issues with never feeling like a piece is done or good enough, and constantly could be updated and improved) (you can spread the awesome of PMD with the world by being my walking billboard).
As I was going through the process of converting some of my designs into potential stickers, which involves removing any heavy white borders (since the stickerization process adds a white border around the whole design) and moving my copyright watermarks around, I decided the very first shirt I made available on Etsy ought to be a sticker. I tried to open the layered Photoshop file for the It’s Plunger Monkey Dynamo shirt, only to discover (and remember) that the original file had been corrupted. Back when I first started designing shirts with the pipe dream of selling them online (pipe dream because I had the idea for selling shirts going all the way back to HS-but that was before interwebs-and once I started coming up with designs, it was several years before I figured out the process and went through the steps to set up a shop) I created all my designs in a single Photoshop document. The thing was probably several hundred layers, with each different design and variation being grouped into it’s own, multi-layer folder. It was a very sluggish document. Anyway, that shirt was in there. Somewhere along the line of upgrading computers and updating Photoshop, the file became corrupted. I have no idea how or why, and I don’t have the knowledge or skills to figure it out. The “style” of PMD was a bit dated anyway, so I decided I’d just redraw the whole thing and make a 2.0 version of the shirt AND make it a sticker. This time around, I created the whole thing in Clip Studio on my iPad.
In May, it was time for my annual Mother’s Day card for my wife.
My 2020 Mother’s Day card for my wife. Every year I spend time thinking about what the kid dragons look like and where they are going to be (they age alongside our kids, and their adventures reflect our own). Without much question, the most memorable event of 2019 for our family was our 4 day trip to Quebec in October. We had a ton of fun, it was really the first real vacation we have taken (most of our “vacations” are trips to places to hike, and while we did plenty of walking and we camped instead of stay in a hotel, this was a very different trip). One of our favorite spots was the waterfalls in the town we stayed in, Levis, at the Parc des Chutes de la Chaudiere. It was a beautiful place, and our family photo there was our 2019 xmas card.
Constantly frustrated with my drawing skills and wanting them to be better, particularly for IPMDT and future comic projects (another one of those road blocks I set up for myself: can’t work on the bigger comic ideas until my drawing is better), I decided I really needed to do some turnaround studies of myself and PMD.
These were both fun and useful, but I’m still not happy with the way I draw myself.
On June 8, 2020, the first of a series of tragic personal losses happened: my memere, my last remaining grandparent, passed away two weeks after turning 99 years old. As I have done at the passing of my other grandparents, I had to paint her portrait. But since it was significant to me that she was the last of my grandparents, I knew I had to do something a little extra. The end result was by far my best painting ever, traditional or digital, and in my own head I feel like I have them to thank for it. You can read the emotional blog post I wrote and see the close ups here. It was an emotionally draining project that took me a month to finally complete in a year that was already emotionally draining on it’s own.
Over the summer, I decided my third shirt of the year was going to be a reworking of a random “character” from a random PMD illustration I had done in 2019. As is often the case, I couldn’t tell when I was done with it, and I also came up with 352 variations. Have I mentioned I can be extremely indecisive? My wife can probably tell you all about it…Anyway, I decided to sit on it and look at it with fresh eyes later. I also polled people on Face Book and Instagram. The end result was I narrowed it down to two options, but didn’t pull the trigger and actually turn the design into a shirt (which you can now confuse your friends, family, and co-workers with here) until a week or so before Xmas.
This guy happened randomly in a random PMD illustration I did in 2019. I found it so hilarious I had to do something more with it. Now the Squid-Chicken/Chicken-Squid is a shirt.
In August-ish, I started playing around with the free version of Z Brush, a digital sculpting bit of software that is highly used in art, movies, and video games. It’s very intuitive and a ton of fun. I immediately started sculpting a PMD head, but I don’t really have anything worth showing here yet. I haven’t spent many hours with the program, but I want to over the coming year. I see a lot of uses, and have already made good use of the original PMD head I made as a reference for drawing him from tricky camera angles in IPMDT. I’d like to create sculpts of all the characters I introduce, not only for my own drawing reference, but also to experiment with 3D printing some things. I see a lot of potential, but I have yet to manage my time well enough to devote the hours I would need to not only get competent at it, but also justify shelling out for one of the full versions with access to more robust tools, features, textures, etc.
September is Dragon Month. Why? Well, if you’ve been paying attention, my wife loves dragons, so every year for her birthday (which is in September) I draw her a dragon formatted to be used as her pc wallpaper (since she has to sit at her computer all day for work). Every year I pick a different theme for the dragon. I envision a world where just about every species evolved from a common dragon ancestor, so there has been a flying dragon, a sea dragon, a tiny mushroom-sized dragon, a forest dragon, and in 2020, an arctic dragon (which you can read more about here). I also turn the illustrations into one of kind shirts for her for Xmas.
This year’s dragon for my wife’s birthday: the Arctic (or Polar) Dragon. This clocked in at about 56 hours and 4 minutes, give or take. It’s a slight departure from the previous entries in that it’s (digital) pen and ink, rather than a fully rendered digital painting. It was my wife’s request, she prefers my ink work I guess.
I studied some images of polar bears to get an appropriate gesture as well as looked up some arctic scenery. I wanted it to be casual and “natural”, almost like wildlife photography. The general concept I’ve been going for with these annual illustrations is essentially “what if there was a world where all the lifeforms evolved from a common dragon ancestor”. I’ve had the idea (or similar ones) for many years, and at some point I’d like to explore it further, maybe make a book of it. I really loved Terryl Whitlatch’s The Wildlife of Star Wars and have thought about doing a fantasy creature field journal of my own, either for something like this or some of the other worlds that exist in my Brain.
I spent a lot of time obsessing over details and textures with this one. I’ve been trying to explore and expand my inking style with my various comic projects, and thought this would be another opportunity to push myself. I had a lot of two steps forward, one step back moments as I tried to figure out how to represent some of the textures (I’m unsurprisingly still not happy with all of them). I feel like I could have kept noodling away at this, and maybe I still will (it could be this year’s Spectrum submission…maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t submit last year, as I didn’t feel I had anything worth submitting.). I thought about adding some faint breath clouds, some atmospheric effects, and some wear/damage to the crystals.
The overall attempt with this image was to digitally replicate something my wife likes, namely my pen and ink work with a bit of Copic Marker greyscale thrown in (for those that keep tabs on my art, that’s how I create her annual Mother’s Day cards). This was all done in Procreate on my iPad Pro.
On September 29, another personal tragedy hit: friend of the family who served with my pepere in WWII and who was in many ways like a fifth grandparent to me, Lou Celentano, passed away at 99 years old. He was an amazing gentleman and a fantastic story teller. I first met him while attending my pepere’s WWII reunions in the early 2000s. Whenever he made it to MA to visit my grandparents, I tried to come down to see him, too. I wrote many long letters to him, filled with lots of pictures, keeping him up to date on all the adventures and events of our little family in NH. I always intended to write more frequently, but life would always get busy so I’d write a 30+ page letter around Thanksgiving time each year. I would keep a separate folder on my computer where I would copy photos I wanted to send him that depicted the things that were keeping us busy. My 2020 folder was pretty full, and I was on the verge of starting my letter when I got the news. It was really weird not writing to him, the last letter I sent him was over the summer to let him know my memere had passed away. I’m very glad I knew him.
Dear family friend, Lou Celentano, visiting us in NH from CT for my kids birthday party in 2016.
October rolled around, which meant it was time for Inktober 2020. I continued my 2019 theme of making every one of the official prompts involved Plunger Monkey in some way. It was a ton of fun and lead to some really good pieces, I think, one of which I turned into my last shirt of 2020 (more on that in a bit). There are 32 illustrations (because I used the wrong prompt list for day one, so I have an extra), far too many to post here, but you can check them all out in the gallery (I meant to do a wrap up post like I have done in previous years, but things got away from me). I’ll post a couple of my favorites, though.
Inktober 2020 Day #4: Radio. I don’t care who you are, this right here is funny. I wasn’t sure what to do for radio at first (I try to look at the prompts a little in advance so I can let my subconsciousness, also referred to as my Brain, work things out), so I decided to look up the definition and some pictures. I immediately gravitated towards the notion of a ham radio, as opposed to a car radio, found a sweet picture of an old one, and came up with this idea. For the record, drawing and inking that radio was intensely tedious! Lots of details. I loved it.
Inktober 2020 Day 6: Rodent. Hey, I’m sort of caught up now (technically I’m posting this at 1am on the 7th, but whatever)! Kapibaras are the original ROUSs (Rodents of Unusual Size, for The Princess Bride fans out there), so of course they would be the perfect steed for Plunger Monkey.
This one went a lot quicker than expected, especially since I had a hard time coming up with anything, but it was still a lot of fun to draw. I’m really loving the way all these ideas for these prompts evolve on the page. I don’t do any thumbnailing first, I just come up with the general idea and start drawing, and invariably all kinds of little details and “gags” and Easter eggs pop into my mind. If someone would pay my handsomely to spend my days doing these wacky illustrations of Plunger Monkey, I’d be a happy camper (and I do have an idea to do a Plunger Monkey Dictionary…a PMD…which would just be things like this. Although, most likely not a COMPLETE dictionary…even at one a day, I don’t know that I have that many days left in this lifetime).
Inktober 2020 Day #10: (A New) Hope. There were a couple of different, iconic scenes from Episode IV I contemplated using (like Luke staring at the binary sunset on Tatooine), but ultimately went with this one, and I’m happy I did. I may have to turn this one into a shirt, too. I find the addition of the Multi Purpose Novelty Squid and Cuppy fun and hilarious. It’s no secret that the whole Star Wars franchise is the single biggest creative influence on me. It completely absorbed me in my youth and fueled my imagination and desire to create my own worlds, characters, and stories, which continues to this day.
Inktober 2020 Day #20: Coral. I guess I should dedicate this one to my wife, not only because she puts up with me sometimes drawing when she’d rather be doing stuff together, but also because she used to be an avid diver…until she met me. My fear of being shark food pretty much killed her favorite hobby/past time, and I think about that a lot.
This illustration took a loooooong time. I had a hard time coming up with the idea, but then found some reference pictures with divers in them that pushed me in this direction. Coral is tough to draw, its very intricate. So many details and textures in this, and I probably could have kept going (but my hand and neck are saying “NO”).
As for PMD’s sign, that’s a reference only people who have watched Spongebob Squarepants enough will get…
Inktober 2020 Day #22: Chef. I knew when I looked ahead and saw this prompt that I had to incorporate the Swedish Chef somehow. He was fond of putting “der chicken in der poot” on The Muppet Show, so I figured if PMD was involved, it would be the Chicken Squid/Squid Chicken “in der poot”. I had fun with this one, though I see areas that could have used some better planning or texturing (there’s a jumble of elements where the chicken squid, the cleaver it’s holding, and the Chef’s hand come together. Not very clear there). I do enjoy PMD’s ready-to-help expression and stance, and of course the “BORK BORK BORK!” on his sign.
Inktober 2020 Day #25: Buddy. And yet another Calvin and Hobbes reference…with a subtle Star Wars reference to boot. I’ve always loved Watterson’s image of Calvin and Hobbes crossing a stream on a log, not only because it’s beautifully rendered, but also because it captures the essence of the characters. This is another personally nostalgic illustration, reflecting on my youth and simpler times (because the adults did all the hard stuff and the worrying). I had a very happy childhood with my family, and I cherish all my memories of those days.
I’ve mentioned many times that Bill Watterson is one of my greatest artistic influences. I can’t hold a candle to him, but I still have a lot of fun paying homage to his art using my own character that likely wouldn’t exist without the heavy influence of Calvin and Hobbes in my younger years.
I was staying on track with my Inktoberings for the first half of the month, but then another tragedy hit: a young man and Eagle Scout, Trevor Pierce, that I had worked with for many years as a volunteer in scouts was tragically killed in an accident just a month and a half into his freshman year at Syracuse University, and a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday. He was very motivated, intelligent, and vibrant, with a very bright future ahead of him. He left an indelible mark on everyone that knew him, particularly his close friends, fellow scouters, and the young scouts he mentored. It was a huge shock to all of us, and it was even more difficult for us to process and find closure due to the challenges imposed by the pandemic.
I did manage to finish Inktober, but it was in the second week of November, not that anyone is keeping track. I moved on to working on our annual family Xmas card (which got hung up in the mail and I wasn’t able to mail out until after the holiday). I then started focusing on a few art updates. I thought it was time to update the PMD Brainism image (which you can now see on the main page), as well as the little PMD head that dots the “I” in my logo (which you can also check out in the logo on the main page).
In the first days of December, yet another tragedy struck: I learned my original karate sensei, Kazumi Tabata, had passed away on or just after Thanksgiving. I started training with him all the way back in my first year of karate in 1995. He was a force of nature. Intense. Powerful. Full of life, and joyful. To this day, when I train, I hear him shouting, encouraging, trying to breath his life force into us. He taught me many things, the most important of which is that I am capable of much more than I think. His focus was mental strength and overcoming doubts and weakness, lessons I still struggle with today but I have his voice in my head urging me on. I earned my black belt with him on my second attempt. He failed me the first time because I lacked something, and he wanted to see how I would respond. Would I give up, or would I multiply my efforts and resolve, train harder, and try again. I had to participate in a weekend long “special training” that was by far the hardest physical and mental thing I have faced. We arrived at a college gym Friday evening and started training. We trained for 3 hours, then got a 3 hour break, and then trained 3 hours again. This pattern repeated until Sunday evening. We stood in deep stances for half an hour plus each leg while sensei walked around, climbing on our backs and hitting us with a shinai (bamboo sword) if we started to stand up to shake our legs out. We did hundreds of kata, hours and hours of basics, duck walks and bunny hops around the basketball court for hours, countless sparring drills, and finally, before we could leave on Sunday: 1000 situps, 1000 pushups, 1000 squat kicks, and 200 kicks with another student on your shoulders. I woke myself up Sunday night doing situps in my sleep. It was awesome. Unfortunately, after earning my black belt, I moved out of state with my now wife, and my ability to stay involved with is organization dropped. I trained elsewhere, and I’ve never stopped training on my own. I always said I was going to make time to go back, to go to a seminar or tournament or other training session. But with kids and scouts and the distance, I never made it happen. I had opportunities and offers to be more involved, to even teach, but I passed them up. I regret not staying more involved, and I will forever regret not having made more effort to train with him again in the 15 years since I was last able. I cherish the memories and what I learned, as well as the friends I still have and still train with occasionally. Sadly, I don’t have many pictures of myself and sensei Tabata, though there are some videos floating around YouTube that I was involved in (and by involved, I mean sensei tossed myself and other students around for videos on the application of katas. Here’s Heian Sundan, Heian Yodan, and Heian Godan. All the applications are near the end, and in one of them I was a tad out of place and slow in my reaction, so instead of going with the movement, sensei Tabata just basically picked me up and dropped me on my head). Here are a few pictures my dad took during my second black belt test, the one I passed in 2001.
One of the few pictures I have of myself in the presence of Sensei Tabata. This was during my second black belt test in 2001, the year I passed. This was also just a few weeks after I started dating my wife, who I met while training karate at a different dojo in preparation for this test (as well as just trying to get as much karate in as possible because I loved it).
I have entered the American Ninja Warrior contest every year except for a few (due to a kid being born and injuries). I have a long history with the show, going back to 2000 or so, long before it was ever broadcast on American airwaves. I had made a friend through karate that went home to Japan and sent another friend and myself a video tape of some Japanese tv programs. There was the original Iron Chef, but also the fourth Sasuke tournament, the first time anyone had beat all 4 stages. I was hooked, it was awesome, I dreamed of going to Japan to compete on the show, but that just wasn’t an option. I was happy when G4 started showing the subtitled show on their channel several years later, and super excited when they announced the first contest to send someone to Japan. I missed the first year, but entered the next. I never got to go overseas, but I did get to compete in 2012 when NBC started taking things over and filmed their own competition stateside. I didn’t do as well as I know I could have, and I’ve been trying to get a second chance ever since. So, it’s usually a big deal for me to put together my entry video every year. In 2020, the contest itself was very different due to Covid, but the turn around time for submitting entries for 2021 was much shorter than usual. I spent a week or so filming and editing and managed to submit the day before the deadline on December 12. I don’t have much hope that I’ll get selected again, there are so many amazing athletes and people with more charisma and better “stories” than me, but, if I don’t enter at all, there is zero chance.
The next PMD image I updated was one that I’ve wanted to turn into a shirt anyway for a long time, so I figured it would serve multiple purposes to tackle that next. I use it as the main logo on the IPMDT Gallery Page, I put it with different text (Plunger Monkey Designs) on the business card I haven’t printed yet, and, as the final days of December were winding down, I turned it into a shirt you can rock and help spread the word of PMD.
The fifth shirt of 2020 was one I had actually designed years and years ago, when the idea of making and selling my own shirts was still a pipe dream (technically, I still consider it a pipe dream since I don’t sell many shirts). It was inspired by Hokusai’s Great Wave print. You can get your zen on with this design here.
Our Xmas card prints finally arrived just before the holiday, so I scrambled to address them all. There are a handful of people on who’s envelopes I draw custom PMD art every year, which is often time consuming and sometimes stressful as I try to think of things that are either related to the person and my relationship with them, or just something funny in general. Last year I stumbled into the theme of “Totally Reasonable Uses for a Plunger”, which was fun, so I went with that again. Turns out, it was fun this time, too. I was really pleased with this particular crop of envelopes, which I will do a separate post about once they actually get into the proper hands (don’t want to spoil anything). As I mentioned last year, that whole theme is just begging to be made into a book, and I’m kind of using the envelopes as really polished thumbnails for more finished art. I’ve been keeping a list of ideas for “uses”, which I hope to add to and perhaps start illustrating in 2021. I still need to sort out exactly how I want the book to look, what the format will be, etc.
Throughout all of 2020, I spent a lot of time working on both IPMDT and Inside Toby’s Brain. With the former, I did a bit of writing and thumbnailing (which I need to do again soon), and finished panels 276-316, some of which were very detailed and complicated. You can check out all the posted strips either by swiping through the strip on the main page or going to the IPMDT Gallery page. I’m still unhappy with a lot of my panels, and I’m constantly threatening to “remaster” them digitally should I finally get around to putting the strip into a book format. I’d really like to do that for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is “fixing” stuff, but I haven’t decided where that falls on my priority list. For ITB, I drew a new page or two, and then started going back and making tweaks and fixes to things that bothered me, as well as trying out a new look in terms of adding paper texture and some custom pencil textures to the shadow areas. It still needs some tweaking, but that project was always about learning how to use Clip Studio better and figuring out the look I wanted and the process to get it.
Finally, on the last day of 2020, after much hemming and hawing and asking for opinions, I bit the bullet and turned that Inktober illustration into my sixth shirt design of the year. You can get your own rogue monkey samurai here.
There you have it, that was my 2020 through the lens of my studio (plenty more happened in “real life”). I came up short on a lot of my goals (didn’t touch Revery or any of the concept art goals, didn’t get as much done with IPMDT as I wanted), but I did get my six shirts out there, as well as a decent amount of other art. Most of my missed 2020 goals are on the 2021 chopping block, in addition to a few others. For example, Clip Studio periodically runs illustration contests, and winners can win money and free subscriptions to the app. I don’t know that I have a chance of winning, but the theme right now is “the best smile”. I figure that’s pretty much tailored for me to do a PMD illustration, which I’ve just barely started. I have until January 14, so that’s going to be my main focus for the next week. As I have mentioned over and over, my Brain is brimming with ideas and things I want to do-illustrations, shirt designs, comic projects, book projects, video game projects, sewing projects-so I’m not in any danger of having nothing to do. My challenge remains to pick something and focus on it while not completely neglecting other things (for example, it’s really easy for me to lose my day to working on IPMDT and not have time to work on something else, but I don’t want to not work on it at all while I work on other things. It’s a balancing act I haven’t figured out yet).
Hopefully 2021 is a better year all around than 2020, I’ll be doing my part to alleviate stress and entertain everyone with my art while I pursue my goals and get some of this stuff out of my Brain.
[…] Previous […]