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One Year On
5 min read
Today I turn 30. I thought I would go into what my art has meant for me over the last year, and why I have tried to so consistently post work on here.
With a looming 30th birthday I started to reflect on my life. While in a lot of senses I have done a lot of interesting things and made some very meaningful steps forwards emotionally and intellectually, I have always found my art to be the part of my life that I was frustrated I did not achieve more. There were a lot of reasons for this but the most straightforward was the belief that I lacked the talent to do anything meaningful and the subsequent lack of confidence to prove that idea wrong.
A friend of mine, several years older, had said he had used his 30th birthday as impetus to get into shape. This inspired me, and I decided a year ago that I would try and make as many strides forwards with my art in the year leading to my 30th as I could. I wasn't sure what I was going to achieve but I at least wanted to feel as if my art was in a place I could take some pride in it. I uploaded every piece I completed with a commentary so that I could reflect back on it later while also going out of my way to jump all over the place in terms of approach and style, because to me this was never about creating pieces, it was about the chronicle of my progress.
This last year has been one of huge change. The first half was the end of a downward spiral that had taken everything from me, in a pretty literal sense. I took up the challenge because at the time my laptop and tablet were all I had and I could pretty much not afford to do anything else. That was where the art of 2k15 came from I would dedicate hours to pieces, agonize, restart, abandon. I hated how hard it was for me, I took no pride in my art or myself. To top it off, a few months in, around April, my tablet pen broke and I was left unable to do anything.
After a series of very unpleasant events I was able to get back on track. I got a job, moved into a new place with people I don't hate, bought a tablet off a friend of mine and around November got back on track. The art from this period is different, generally quicker and rougher as I use what precious little time I have after my 9 to 5 job to do all the typical 'adult living' junk but insisting I keep going even if it was tiring.
And something changed. All of a sudden I could see it. As I hit New Year and started redrawing stuff from a year ago I was shocked. All the time, all the study and frustration, had started to pay off. Sometimes it wasn't visible in the final product but I could feel it. It would be achieving a piece in an hour that previously would take me 4. It was being happy with sketches. It would be trying new things out and getting why it worked. It was seeing my flaws, not being content in hiding behind certain things. I was enjoying my art and the progress felt like it was worth all of it. Even the feedback I got improved, from both strangers and artists I consider my superiors.
So now I am 30. Am I where I want to be artistically? Honestly, not really... though I wonder if I ever knew what I wanted to begin with.
But do I feel as if I am making progress? More than I could ever have dreamed.
Right now I am a hurricane of influences and approaches. Occasionally I hit that sweet spot of focus and achieve close to where I want to be, most of the time I just bash at the page until something works. But through at all I can feel the process tighten, the flow more natural, the edge more sharp. I get excited at the idea of creating a new piece, sometimes I will create two in a night. I keep posting up my pieces even knowing no one really cares, because to me looking back on a timeline of images and the steady progress visible through them has completely changed my outlook on art and my participation in it.
Today I am 30. I don't feel different. Maybe my art doesn't reflect my age, I wasted so many years. But I am content that the me now is still growing and so is my art, and that I wouldn't have made this progress without the life I had lead. And finally I am starting to make peace with it all.
A year from now I wonder where I will be. I've never been one to look ahead, to be excited about the future. But now that I am looking back from the milestone that I set for myself a year ago I finally get it. I suppose that is what art means to me.
With a looming 30th birthday I started to reflect on my life. While in a lot of senses I have done a lot of interesting things and made some very meaningful steps forwards emotionally and intellectually, I have always found my art to be the part of my life that I was frustrated I did not achieve more. There were a lot of reasons for this but the most straightforward was the belief that I lacked the talent to do anything meaningful and the subsequent lack of confidence to prove that idea wrong.
A friend of mine, several years older, had said he had used his 30th birthday as impetus to get into shape. This inspired me, and I decided a year ago that I would try and make as many strides forwards with my art in the year leading to my 30th as I could. I wasn't sure what I was going to achieve but I at least wanted to feel as if my art was in a place I could take some pride in it. I uploaded every piece I completed with a commentary so that I could reflect back on it later while also going out of my way to jump all over the place in terms of approach and style, because to me this was never about creating pieces, it was about the chronicle of my progress.
This last year has been one of huge change. The first half was the end of a downward spiral that had taken everything from me, in a pretty literal sense. I took up the challenge because at the time my laptop and tablet were all I had and I could pretty much not afford to do anything else. That was where the art of 2k15 came from I would dedicate hours to pieces, agonize, restart, abandon. I hated how hard it was for me, I took no pride in my art or myself. To top it off, a few months in, around April, my tablet pen broke and I was left unable to do anything.
After a series of very unpleasant events I was able to get back on track. I got a job, moved into a new place with people I don't hate, bought a tablet off a friend of mine and around November got back on track. The art from this period is different, generally quicker and rougher as I use what precious little time I have after my 9 to 5 job to do all the typical 'adult living' junk but insisting I keep going even if it was tiring.
And something changed. All of a sudden I could see it. As I hit New Year and started redrawing stuff from a year ago I was shocked. All the time, all the study and frustration, had started to pay off. Sometimes it wasn't visible in the final product but I could feel it. It would be achieving a piece in an hour that previously would take me 4. It was being happy with sketches. It would be trying new things out and getting why it worked. It was seeing my flaws, not being content in hiding behind certain things. I was enjoying my art and the progress felt like it was worth all of it. Even the feedback I got improved, from both strangers and artists I consider my superiors.
So now I am 30. Am I where I want to be artistically? Honestly, not really... though I wonder if I ever knew what I wanted to begin with.
But do I feel as if I am making progress? More than I could ever have dreamed.
Right now I am a hurricane of influences and approaches. Occasionally I hit that sweet spot of focus and achieve close to where I want to be, most of the time I just bash at the page until something works. But through at all I can feel the process tighten, the flow more natural, the edge more sharp. I get excited at the idea of creating a new piece, sometimes I will create two in a night. I keep posting up my pieces even knowing no one really cares, because to me looking back on a timeline of images and the steady progress visible through them has completely changed my outlook on art and my participation in it.
Today I am 30. I don't feel different. Maybe my art doesn't reflect my age, I wasted so many years. But I am content that the me now is still growing and so is my art, and that I wouldn't have made this progress without the life I had lead. And finally I am starting to make peace with it all.
A year from now I wonder where I will be. I've never been one to look ahead, to be excited about the future. But now that I am looking back from the milestone that I set for myself a year ago I finally get it. I suppose that is what art means to me.
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So local Australian artists are participating in our version of the popular comic event 24 hour challenge where you have 24 hours to draw 24 pages.
My recent uploads in the True Frontier folder are my entry. I finished and uploaded the 24 pages with almost two hours to spare.
My key words were Crisis, Captain and Vacuum.
A lot of the themes are based on vague culture references and the various group themes me and my friends considered [first western then fantasy, so I did both and chucked some both in cause why not].
Artistically I wanted to improve my hatching. The art is inconsistent partially because I didn't ink them in order, I jumped all over the place.
I literally forgot what the original dialogue was meant to be so I made drivel up. I'm also pretty unwell so I did okay considering.
Was fun but tiring. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.
My recent uploads in the True Frontier folder are my entry. I finished and uploaded the 24 pages with almost two hours to spare.
My key words were Crisis, Captain and Vacuum.
A lot of the themes are based on vague culture references and the various group themes me and my friends considered [first western then fantasy, so I did both and chucked some both in cause why not].
Artistically I wanted to improve my hatching. The art is inconsistent partially because I didn't ink them in order, I jumped all over the place.
I literally forgot what the original dialogue was meant to be so I made drivel up. I'm also pretty unwell so I did okay considering.
Was fun but tiring. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing.
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So yeah the whole deal is
3 min read
I forgot to do this on my birthday but basically I have a year until I turn 30. It is a funny time for a lot of people, forcing you to reflect on a lot of things like how far you've come in life and that you've been out of elementary schooling almost as long as you were in it.
A close friend of mine once said regarding his turning 30 that he didn't want to hit that milestone being weak. So he trained and exercised and buffed up significantly.
This profoundly inspired me, though getting healthy is too much of a pipe dream for me to humour. Instead I decided to focus on an area of art that had always eluded/frustrated me: digital art. I had always wished I was better, but lacked the patience and dedication necessary to ever be any good. Actually, that probably applies to all of my art, but I needed somewhere to focus. To that end I decided I would dedicate as much of this year to improving as I could, ergo my recent output.
Luckily it seems to be going okay, the improvement is clear and if nothing else I note that I get more positive feedback with every image.
Incidentally, I chose to focus on fanart for two reasons. First is that it means I can focus more on the actual production of an image without having to think up new ideas and designs, saving me a lot of time and forcing me to learn to recreate detailed clothing and varied faces and builds, etc. Second is that it is easier to maintain passion, as most of the characters I decide to draw have some meaning to me.
That is part of why I try and put the blurb with the images, so that people know what I was thinking. On the other and they are also more for my own reference, as when I read over them later I get an impression of what has changed since then.
Scarily enough images from earlier in the year feel totally alien to me already. I wonder how far I can get over the next year?
Well, that is the basic idea of it anyway. I hope if nothing else that seeing me chip away inspires others to do the same.
A close friend of mine once said regarding his turning 30 that he didn't want to hit that milestone being weak. So he trained and exercised and buffed up significantly.
This profoundly inspired me, though getting healthy is too much of a pipe dream for me to humour. Instead I decided to focus on an area of art that had always eluded/frustrated me: digital art. I had always wished I was better, but lacked the patience and dedication necessary to ever be any good. Actually, that probably applies to all of my art, but I needed somewhere to focus. To that end I decided I would dedicate as much of this year to improving as I could, ergo my recent output.
Luckily it seems to be going okay, the improvement is clear and if nothing else I note that I get more positive feedback with every image.
Incidentally, I chose to focus on fanart for two reasons. First is that it means I can focus more on the actual production of an image without having to think up new ideas and designs, saving me a lot of time and forcing me to learn to recreate detailed clothing and varied faces and builds, etc. Second is that it is easier to maintain passion, as most of the characters I decide to draw have some meaning to me.
That is part of why I try and put the blurb with the images, so that people know what I was thinking. On the other and they are also more for my own reference, as when I read over them later I get an impression of what has changed since then.
Scarily enough images from earlier in the year feel totally alien to me already. I wonder how far I can get over the next year?
Well, that is the basic idea of it anyway. I hope if nothing else that seeing me chip away inspires others to do the same.
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Despite the official event being later in the year the local Australian 24 hour challenge is held on Queens weekend in June. For those not aware the challenge has you draw 24 pages of comic in 24 hours, usually with several keywords advised on the day or at time of starting. THere are rarely restrictions on tools or methods, and despite being a huge drain you find there are many regulars who take the plunge... myself being one of them.
It was the first time I had done an entry with other artists in a couple of years, having done it solo a few times, and I must say it is a lot more fun that way. THough they are both superior artists to me I feel I still held my ground, being the only to produce the full 24 pages.
My keywords were Unjust, Atonement and Clinch. None of us were fond of them as words but you've gotta deal with that sometimes. You can check out my entry here treyzuka.deviantart.com/galler…
It was the first time I had done an entry with other artists in a couple of years, having done it solo a few times, and I must say it is a lot more fun that way. THough they are both superior artists to me I feel I still held my ground, being the only to produce the full 24 pages.
My keywords were Unjust, Atonement and Clinch. None of us were fond of them as words but you've gotta deal with that sometimes. You can check out my entry here treyzuka.deviantart.com/galler…
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Drawing With Us and Modern Life
1 min read
The classes I teach are still going strong, though we go under the name 'Drawing With Us' in recent times. My peculiar brand of insight mashed together with self depreciation and force fed to young artists goes onwards even as what 'anime' and 'manga' art in the West changes little by little.
I hope to do more comics, coming to the conclusion that no matter how many types of art I try I always feel comics are where I belong. I will see how long this enthusiasm lasts though, haha.
It is as fun as ever to see young artists outgrowing me so if I've ever taught you drop me a line and let me see what you're up to art wise.
I hope to do more comics, coming to the conclusion that no matter how many types of art I try I always feel comics are where I belong. I will see how long this enthusiasm lasts though, haha.
It is as fun as ever to see young artists outgrowing me so if I've ever taught you drop me a line and let me see what you're up to art wise.
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