Holiday Dump Edition

So this Christmas break hasn't been as productive as I would have liked, but simultaneously I've been too swamped to properly update the blog. So here is a triple update demonstrating that I have still been arting these past 3 weeks.

Gonna go lie down now.

Brief Update

Christmas arting is taking away a lot of my time and energy right now, so I'm putting the update off until (probably) next weekend, which will be a double-long update *blorp secret santas*

Another week

Turns out it's kind of hard to render something photographed by an electron microscope.

Wind, Water, Time and Dirt

Ugh, that landscape. I need to find some good resources for painting landscapes from reference. Color is not my friend.

This week saw the release of a plot-exploding Flash animation for MSPaint Adventures, as well as a new MSPA album, so I drew some of that. And a random reference-free Katara from Avatar. And a quick birthday card for my nephew Drew. So... yeah. Whole lotta little kids comin at you this week.

Week 15 and an asterisk

Commission for Mike Wieclawek and Rhia Charko celebrating their second year together

Taking a break to doodle something mindless

WIP. Still hammering away at it

I don't think this is technically NSFW

I’m going to forego my usual update format this week. I’ll be resuming normal transmission next week. (Incoming chunk of text. If you aren’t super into the blog you can safely skip it.)

This is probably something that will happen every so often, especially when my art workload ramps up like it typically does around the holidays. The goal of this blog at the outset was to get me drawing every day, and bring my artistic skills up to something resembling a professional standard. I’ve set up a weekly quota of bulletpoints to help me improve in certain areas, but I’m starting to realize that some weeks there will be pieces that simply command too much of my attention for me to be able to focus on these studies to the extent I need to. This has been the case the past two weeks.

            Now, my options in these cases are to either shelve my larger projects in order to try and finish these studies in an evening, or focus my creative energies on finishing the pieces that have deadlines and clients. If the goal of this blog was to get me to hone my skills by pouring several hours a night into drawing and building up my portfolio, I think the sacrifices of the latter are completely acceptable. Now, ideally I will be able to strike a balance between my studies, my art workload, and my school workload, and be able to reach the finish line every week, and I’m still going to strive for that. But if devoting 15 minutes to a token environment study in order to meet a quota means I’ll lose time I could be spending on a commission, I will choose the commission.

            That was a lot of words. Sorry for venting on this blog that I own. I’ve been kind of torn up these past two weeks over why I’ve been pouring so much into my work and yet it feels like this ship is starting to sink after just 3 months. I just needed to step back and evaluate what it is that I’m doing here again.

~Eric