2019: year in review

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Happy new year to one and all! And especially to my 93 followers. It’s been an interesting year, with (for me) some very good bits and very bad bits. I’ll not review that, nor the state of my country, or planet; but I do want to review the state of my blog, and set goals for the coming year.

Artwise, 2019 was a pretty good year. For the first time, I managed to stick to a regular posting schedule for a whole year (on this blog; not on the other one, alas). Forcing yourself to stick something up every week means you occasionally post stuff that isn’t all that good, but the point is the discipline and getting the practice in. (Of course, what the artist thinks is good and what the audience thinks are different things… dabble in anything creative and you’ll eventually wind up asking “how come no-one likes my best stuff but something I threw together in 5 minutes is getting rave reviews?”) I also did stuff for Inktober ’19 – not the full drawing-a-day challenge, but a more relaxed at-least-2-a-week challenge.

In 2019 I put a little bit of effort into improving my technique – e.g. hair, waves, kirby krackles, giant robots – either because I needed to draw something in particular, or because I was tired of my work sucking in that regard. I also started trying watercolours.

I drew most of a 14-page comic, provisionally titled “Virgil” (still working on that); normally I have vague plans for comics that I never get around to doing, but there’s a very hard time limit on this one so I managed to get going and get a fair amount done. 14 pages doesn’t sound a lot, but each page is about a day’s work and I have to fit it around my day job. (I should mention that I really like my day job.)

I began curating a blog, the Blue Hat Art Blog, for an artistically-gifted relative. Sadly I did not meet my weekly posting schedule for that in 2019 (despite being given the material by someone else, so there’s really no excuse).

Additionally, in early 2019 an RL friend, Walter Aske published the book “Vocations” containing art by myself, illustrating some strange and thought-provoking short stories.

Pageviews have been on a downward trend since 2016 (visitors since 2018), and I’m not sure why. Probably because the amount of stuff competing for people’s attention keeps going up (including the amount of art that’s far better than mine), and the number of people looking at stuff isn’t going up as fast. Likes are on an upward trend, though.

My plans for 2020 – sub conditione Jacobi, “if the Lord will, and if we shall live” – are thus:

  • to continue the posting schedule
    • and post to the other blog on schedule! (for as long as I have material)
  • to do Inktober again, and do more drawings this time (I did 11 of 31 prompts last year)
  • to step up efforts to improve technique
    • Every month, at least one post either of watercolour or learning to draw some particular thing
    • …and be a bit better about giving credit to the tutorials/howto’s that I was getting help from
  • to finish the Virgil comic in the next week or two
  • to do another short comic, with a page every three weeks at least (as I said, I have a day job). (This doesn’t mean I’ll post them every three weeks; comic pages are better posted in batches.)
    • Provisionally I’ll get started on this, which should come in at 10-15 pages (I have the story in my head); but there’s an alternative project (story outline drawn up by the Artistic Relative) which may take priority.

The best stuff I did this year, as judged by myself, is:

As judged by the number of people hitting the “like” button, my best stuff this year was Miles Mechanicus and the Inktober posts week 1, week 2 and week 3. (Those probably benefited from the Inktober tag attracting traffic.) Runners-up: Inktober wrap-up, books, More Robots.

So, that’s it. Thanks for reading, and have a good year!

One thought on “2019: year in review”

  1. Pingback: 2020: Year in Review | inadaptation

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