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Another life update incoming here. So the good and potentially bad news is that I found a full-time job. I start near the end of this week, and it's definitely been anxiety inducing. I've been trying to frame it in my mind as being similar to high school, though I'm unsure how helpful that is considering I struggled with the long hours in high school. But that may also have just been due to my depression at the time.
I've been recovering from depression for the past few years, and since around 2022, I feel like the symptoms have started to noticeably fade away. Medication didn't really help much; I think I was just incredibly lonely and burnt out, and once my life situation began to improve, so did I. Either way, I'm glad things have been getting better.
However, sometimes I worry about relapsing. I struggle a lot with changes to my life, and big changes like getting a full-time job are sure to bring me some amount of distress. I want to believe I can handle it, though. If I don't believe in myself, it'll just make things harder for me.
On a brighter note, I've been making strides in my art lately. I've been fiddling with my process and as a result, l think I've been not only able to drastically cut down on how long it takes me to draw (it used to take me 12+ hours for a single drawing with any degree of complexity. Now it's around half that time!), but I've also been much happier with my style lately. To think all of this could happen if I just deviated further from what I thought was 'standard' for digital art!
In my mind, digital art tends to be done in four steps, with possible variation: sketch, lineart, flats, and finally shading. This is the practise I see most often, something I've picked up on after watching many speedpaints and tutorials. I know when I just started out, I was really rigid in regards to this, believing it to be the only way to draw.
As time passed, I began to make small modifications to my process. First, I added a fifth step for rendering, where I merged layers and did finishing touches on top of the drawing. Then I slowly began to leave the lineart behind, doing what I called 'painting' and just working off a sketch, as seen in my earlier drawing tutorial. This was my favourite process for a while.
Recently, I started messing more with lineart again. I quickly noticed that I was having trouble achieving the look I wanted to with lineart though, and as a result, I ditched it again. With a few more tweaks, I ended up switching from sketching with lines to just blocking out colours and shapes. I also stopped rendering each part individually (so making sure the eyes were finished, then moving into the face, then hair, etc.) and started just focusing on colours for most of the drawing, adding lineart and rendering only as a finishing touch. It's been an eye-opening experience for sure. If I continue to stay with this process, which I hope I do, I may make another tutorial later down the road for fun.
The biggest net positive from all this is definitely the time aspect. One of my biggest worries about starting work was only being able to do two or three drawings a month, but with this under my belt, I have a much brighter outlook. Being able to finish things in a timely manner is liberating, and I'm all the more glad for it.
As a side note, having finished two sets of goals I've set for myself, I'm excited to be moving on to the third! I have quite a few ideas for Adventures in an Uneventful Actaera, and I look forward to bringing them to life! I've also noticed that most of my narrators for stories tend to be male, which also will be the case for the boyband alternate universe story I plan to write. I hope to rectify this and either give some stories in my series Ren's point of view, or to just write a few alternate universe/one shot stories with my female characters. I love them a lot as well, and I hope to give them the attention they deserve.
With that, I hope to update with another blog post a few weeks from now to talk about how my job is going. I'll likely be tired and frustrated in the interim, so I'll put it as a reminder here: it gets better! Adults can still have hobbies and time to themselves, and once I adapt to my new schedule, I'll find ways to make what I value stay in my life. Things will be great, and that's the mindset I'm going into all this with. Tomorrow I'm getting a haircut, so I'll be facing this new era with a new look as well. Here's to the best for a new start!
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