December and the end of last year ended up being about recovery, rest and a lot of planning and reorganization in preparation for what’s to come. I’m in the middle of reorganizing my studio and setting up a better home studio for Hex, it allowed me to finally get rid of a lot of stuff i don’t need anymore, make room for new art, art storage and tools (like a professional printer to make my own prints!).
It feels good to take time to finally get around to doing this, with the pace things go these days it’s easy for me to get swamped or overwhelmed with life and get used to things not working really well or being annoying instead of taking the time to fix it. I feel like my relationship to my art practice is changing, it’s becoming more and more a primary thing in my life and something I want to approach with the commitment and professionalism as a “career”, even tho I never really liked that capitalistic concept. That shifting perspective is bringing back memories from art school and learning about a lot of good practices for making and preserving pieces, resources and artist run centers for artists, ways to get financing as a professional artist and more. A lot of stuff that I had stored in a deep place in my brain after finishing university, positively turned off from the contemporary art scene and any pursuits related to it.
Now that enough time has passed and that I healed my creativity and allow myself to see me as an artist again without the shackles of art academia attached to it, it gives me new hope and motivation to pursue my art and commercial illustration at a higher level. To that effect I’ve made plans for this year, things that I’d love to accomplish and improve upon:
- get 2 Pious Rot modules out in the world and put things in place for the full book
- release my first full length album as ritual dust
- challenge myself to draw more characters, creatures and scenes
- make more paintings, personal and commissioned ones and improve my technique
- start selling art prints of my favorite old and new pieces (also thinking of bringing back the print club tier on this Patreon)
I’m also really grateful of the opportunities I had in 2023 and the work I did during that year, a lot of pieces that are now in my personal favorites and will inspire me more work in the future I’m sure. I’m really of what me and my friend Sedge did with the whole Pious Rot project, it was really good for me to explore world-building and fantasy art again, my inner child is really happy about it. I spent a good part of my childhood drawing dragons, castles and medieval weapons (I still have a lot of those if you’re ever curious about what that looked like), and I feel like with all the experience I gathered through life I can bring the worlds that I used to imagine and the ones that come to me now to life. Making artwork and design work for music was also really rewarding and fulfills some old dreams of mine of seeing my images on album covers and band merch. Similarly to illustrating fantasy stories, drawing images to capture the essence of a musical album taps into the same creative ability that I have to transmute stories, places, and sounds into visuals and I can’t wait to do more this year.
On this, I hope you all had a good start of the year and I’ll be writing to you again soon with some news regarding the Pious Rot RPG project and some updates concerning this Patreon and the next steps I want to take for it.
Thanks again to all of you for your continued support, it means a lot :)