2022 Yearly Theme

Happy New Year ya’ll!

Ah yes the crisp air of a fresh new year! It’s that time to get really existential on your life and whether or not all you’re doing is getting you anywhere! Oh wait, is that just me? Lol I guess it comes with having a birthday right at the beginning of the year! That’s right babyyy, it’s my birthday! So two things right away, since it’s my birthday I’m drawing what I want this month. 😤 Tbh I really just want to finish up a lot of WIPs from last year that I really liked (Midnight sits in my WIP folder and it kills me) and I want to draw Dark Souls fan art. So everyone get ready for Gwynevere. 👀 Also I really want to focus on working on MC3 and making actual progress on the comic!

Speaking of which here’s some MC3 pages and a bunch of sketches of the characters to start off the year! My biggets and main goal is to be really pushing MC3 into my schedule and now that the holidays are over I’ll be able to really get life back on track. 

Now onto the more heartfelt and heady stuff. It’ll be a long post so TL;DR: 2022 yearly theme is From Ashes. Everything has been horrible for me but now it’s time for me to grow into something more than what I once was.

So if you haven’t heard of a yearly theme I highly suggest watching this video from CGP Grey: 

https://youtu.be/NVGuFdX5guE

Short story shorter is to not have a concrete goal like a resolution but instead to create a theme to live your life by. Whether it being a “Year of Health” where you can approach it from several different options and with different ways of gauging success. It’s something I’ve really tried to do approach my years by since I had heard of it. 

My 2022 theme is: From Ashes.

2021 can be fairy put into ✨worst year of my life✨ category fairly comfortably. Last year I focused much more on myself and putting my needs first, something I had notoriously hadn’t done. I really wanted to focus on my confidence as an artist and as a creator. No matter how terrible the year got I really learned to stand up for myself. So while I battled intense loneliness and suicidal thoughts (we’re just gonna keep on moving past that point), the fact that I’m still here and that I’ve really pushed myself to take control of what I’m creating still feels like a victory and a way that I followed through with my last years theme.

So what does From Ashes mean to me? Well honestly it’s a bit complex to describe. I’m a position where I’m slightly rebooting my career and whether or not it ends up being successful by the end of the year honestly decides whether I continue to pursue art as a career. I’ve been a freelancer for a few years with very little success and a lot of business decisions that have been made through the years have fallen through for me and have put me at the brink of collapse. Which honestly feels like the time to really push myself into something new. Last year was the first time I really started drawing smut after a few artist recommended that I do it since it would really fit my style and honestly it’s helped me so much. It’s helped my mental health infinitely and has quite literally saved me from having my power turned off numerous times in the last few months. It’s something I get so excited to draw and love seeing the responses it gets from people. It’s something I want to take seriously as a business and I want to really make ero comics with it.

There’s parts of me that want to really take strides into breaking away from traditional comics full time, which I love but after 11 (!!) years I’ve had no real success. Exploring new routes to see where I can flourish whether it’s webcomics with MC3 or hell maybe after I can afford to get a new computer get into game development and make a dating sim. Which is an idea that’s been sitting in my mind (and wip folder) a lot more lately. 

 I don’t want to just take the lessons I learned from last year and move on like nothing happened and I really don’t want to just be building foundations on ground that’s not going to support me. I want to be growing into something new. Even if it’s something that everyone else already sees in me or believed I would become, it’s a new and painful growth for me. 

Thank you for being one of the main pillars helping me through this. 🖤