December Illustration + Process! (Patreon)

Hey ya'll! 

Here's December's illustration, I decided to do a fun tanuki character for this one but more importantly this is one of the first times I've felt comfortable going straight to color! Here's the process and high-res: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f6ska166557wvb7/AADoyn9B6zrcEkGIQk6pp1j2a?dl=0

This one took a bit longer because I was not feeling comfortable with what I was doing with my art until right at the very end of the month, and really this entire last year. I spent all year experimenting with different rendering techniques, feeling like I was constantly chasing this form I had in 2019 (form in this case meaning the way in which I render and execute on my work). One of the things I've always been able to do is switch gears on a dime, going from hyper realistic, to hyper stylized and everything in between. But along with this comes an issue of consistency where my pieces one after the next can often times look like they aren't even done by the same person. This doesn't seem like a big deal and I don't treat it as one most of the time, but working publicly like I do it is important that people be able to recognize your art so you can get more work. Improving on your ability can get you really far but there's a point where no matter how hard you improve if it's not getting in front of people you aren't going to make enough to pay rent. 

So at the end of 2019 I hit on something that I could do consistently, was extremely happy with on a creative level and that my audience seemed to enjoy. But as is so often the case for me, I found my work drifting by as early as February. At some point I forgot how it was I even came to make those pieces in the first place and then spent the rest of the year trying to figure it out. In the end I realized that chasing that was the problem and that how I had created those works was that I was allowing my intuition from years and years of studying take over. I wasn't focused on the form, the execution, the color choices or any technical element. I just made choices I thought looked good and so they worked for me. Recently I've found some warmups and starters that really helped this come back into view. Things like filling a page with dots and then connecting them with single clean lines and filling pages with circles helps me way more than it feels like it should. Drawing characters with no attributes is a huge benefit as well. Drawing primitive forms in perspective helps a lot. I feel like these all give me the chance to draw without even being able to focus on the technical aspects of art and gets my mind just focused on creating.

In conclusion, if you are putting time in to study then when it comes time to do the work that is totally yours, just try to let your intuition take over. That's way easier said than done but if someone like me that has severe ADHD can do it, I know anyone can.