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Hey! It's been a while. I honestly haven't been writing blog posts as much as I hoped I'd be. I feel like I have a lot to say, but it comes in little bits and pieces and is rarely enough to be a couple paragraphs long, or just even long enough to warrant making a blog post. I'm probably entering a new era of my life soon, though, and I think I have some thoughts on the matter, as well as what I hope to do moving forwards.
Never mind the fact that a lot of the time, the goals I set for myself fall away or change with my whims, but I've been trying to create some more content lately, and I hope this will come to pass. More on this later.
For now, I am approaching the end of my academic life. I'm graduating in a few weeks, after I take some finals which I'm not too worried about, and then there's just a lot of hazy uncertainty floating around after that point. I'm trying to seek full-time employment at the moment: it's bound to be a long struggle, and I haven't had any notable leads or results yet. The question of how much time I will have to work on creative pursuits once I'm employed still scares me. But I want to believe in my love for my characters, and that my passion for creating will win over however tired or frustrated I get because of my work life. I need to remember that a lot of the fan artists and fan content creators I see online are probably full-time employed too, and that if they can create things for themselves and others on the side, then I can do it too!
I feel like I have a lot of regrets about my academic path though. I chickened out of one major at the beginning of senior year, and I ended up switching to a worse, but easier major at that point. Before this, I had already wanted to switch majors from what I had done originally, possibly to something to do with IT/CS. But my school is dumb and wouldn't let me change my major without huge risks: I'd have to take some preliminary classes to catch up, do well in them, and only then could I apply to the IT/CS program, which I could be declined from, and would result in me having a semester where I didn't have any classes. It didn't seem worth it to commit to that gambit and risk delaying my graduation further, so I just settled for basically any old degree I could get.
I originally wanted to get a remote job of some sort; I still do, but I think it's probably in my best interest to try for an in-person job, despite my fear of driving and being outside for long periods of time.
That aside, I've had some ideas with where I want to take my characters down the road. I've been trying to finish some new icons of my characters for a while (since I think my style is going more in the direction I want lately); I still need to do Eleanor's, I might redo Allen's because I don't like how his turned out, and then there's just Edvard (whom I have yet to settle on a design for) and Penelope (whose design is being done by my best friend, and I'm excited for it to be completed based on the WIPs they've sent!).
I've also been trying to chip away a bit at reference sheets. Right now, I have finished Ren's (which I forgot to upload, and I will do so in a bit) and have Halvatt's in the works. They are the two I've drawn the most, and I think they're the only ones I'm comfortable with giving a reference sheet at the moment. Everyone else's designs feel more up in the air, and I would like to give them little tweaks before I fully commit to an entire sheet, as they are a pain for me to make.
As for plans for the future, I've been experimenting with a lot of mediums this past year and a half, and I think I'm getting to the point where I realise specific forms of content just aren't for me. As much as I love MVs/videos and comics from a consumption angle, creating them feels incredibly boring and unfun to me. I enjoy being able to polish my work and I don't think MVs or videos, with the amount of content in them, are really conducive to finished, polished pieces.
But I still want to tell stories. I want to express my characters in a narrative sense, rather than just with cool character illustrations. To this end, I've recently started thinking about delving back into writing. I might revamp sections of my site to have an official writing and worldbuilding section; I was thinking of doing a series of one-shots taking place in my OCs' world, which would involve me having to actually explain how my world works (with the worldbuilding/glossary section) and then having a section for my actual works. Up until now, I've only really written two longer form pieces with my OCs that I want to share. It's up on my goals page still, but I plan on still uploading them whenever I can get off my ass and do it. One of them is an AU while the other takes place in the main universe. Maybe I'll have a miscellaneous writing section paired with a "main" writing section.
Either way, I plan to illustrate for these pieces, hopefully one drawing per. That means it will take a while to produce these, and I'm still in the preliminary stages of experimenting with this, so who knows if this will ever bear fruit. But expect the site to change a little in the days to come, and hopefully it will have more content to offer as well. I also plan on cross uploading these written, illustrated pieces to Archive of Our Own and possibly Toyhouse as well, as these are the only platforms I know at the moment that support original work and images in the text, while still being primarily geared towards hobbyists. I don't really expect to generate much traffic on these pieces, which is why I'm hesitant on Toyhouse; I think the cross posting would be for ease of access more than anything else, as it's (and I'm sure some people have noticed by now) difficult to send links with this site and it just breaks everything. I might fix that in the future, but for now I'm fine with it.
That's all for this post. Hopefully the future will be kind to all of us.
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