Grenbug

Art Update

I only did a few art lessons this month. The gesture drawing class is just too intimidating to me, and very hard to do. I’m allowing it to intimidate me. I could just go for it, no matter how bad and awkward things are. But instead I avoid it! So, strategies for next month:

• plan my day to try to get a lesson in Monday to Friday
• if gesture is just too intimidating, do something more fun, such as the sketchbook class, or any easy class, this helps me getting starting and moving forward anyway. And I just might be able to work up the courage to do the lesson too!

Other than lessons, I did some quick fun art for episodes, just rough sketches.

Oh, and, I did a whole bunch of art for my Lore episode! See this is why I need to do monthly reviews. It’s done and out, so I forget all the work that went into it. I learned how to do some basic animation in Clip Studio Paint and used that in a video. Plus, I did all these lore sketches. It was a lot of fun and a lot of hard work.

Life Update

In August, I took a break from social media, so no browsing of Reddit, Bluesky, or Instagram. This made my month much calmer, and I’m surprised by how much. I found that a big part of my social media experience was reading something in the news, then going out to social media to see people’s reactions. I never went out looking for reactions to good news, of course, only bad news. And people’s reactions were emotional, but with no resolution or action steps to do something about the news event. And there was often unfounded speculation, or misinformation. So, yes, taking a break from that was refreshing.

I also experimented with watching less YouTube videos, at least at the beginning of the month. This was also a good thing to do. I made myself wait until Saturday each week, and then I could only watch videos from people I was subscribed to. I also changed my YouTube shortcut on my browsers to go directly to the Subscriptions tab. This was really useful! Then, as I looked at the list of videos from my subscribed channels, I really thought about them. If I wasn’t really into the majority of the channel’s videos, I unsubscribed. This leaves me with a short list of videos each week, which is great, and it’s all videos that I really want to watch!

I even took it a step further and challenged myself to do some art based on the thumbnail image, which was a ton of fun! I actually looked forward to Saturday to do some art and watch some cool videos!

I’ll post some examples here, it was a fun challenge. I dropped off on it mid month, but maybe I’ll pick it up again in September. It was fun.

Here’s another silly example, and I might actually use this concept for a future Skyblock video. My challenge was that I needed to create some kind of art based on the thumbnail, so I used the gesture and concept, and applied it to cats! 🙂

Even looking back over these is so much fun. It also made me more invested in the video instead of mindless watching. This was actually inspired by Ali’s video where he talked about needing to create more than you consume. So, in order to slow down my YouTube video consumption, I made myself create by making some kind of art based on the thumbnail before I consumed the video!

Here’s Ali’s video on Creating more than you Consume: