Grenbug

Art Update

I hardly drew this month. It’s been a few busy and difficult months (see Oct & Nov Review), so it’s taken me some time to get back to sketching. I have been doing little thumbnail stick-figure sketches with ideas for future drawings that I want to do. And at the mid to end of the month, I started at least doing daily warmups of boxes, lines and ellipses. If nothing else, it’s getting me to sit down and pick up a pencil. Honestly, it’s helping. I actually have the desire to site down and draw now, where it was a struggle to do that before. So, things are looking up.

On a whim, I decided to click on an ad for 21 Draw and signed up for a year. I’m starting on the Learn to Draw in 21 Days series and while it’s ‘easy’ as far as what it’s teaching, the best thing is the lesson of sitting down to draw every day.

One of the issues with SVS is that they quickly move into more advanced topics, so I’m having trouble staying motivated there. I’m in the class where we are designing characters, but I don’t have the skills yet to draw characters, so I’m a bit stuck there. 21 Draw seems to have a lot more introductory and beginner level classes, so I feel like it will be a good supplement to my learning. I’m starting with the Absolute Beginner classes, but that’s fine, it’s getting me to draw daily and feel more confident to try things.

Minecraft Update

While art is hard, you know what’s easy? Minecraft! In the last few stressful months, I have made that hard/easy decision everyday and have done the easy thing and played a lot of Minecraft. It was a great stress relief. I released 15 episodes of my Longplay (no commentary) series, and while I had fun and it was a blast, I wasn’t getting many views. The biggest problem however, is that it was distracting me from my bigger art goals. If I always make the easy choice, I’m not making the hard choice to work on my art and improve my skills.

My channel was always intended to be a mix of art and Minecraft and I’ve been neglecting my art. So, I decided to prioritize my art goals, which means I can no longer do weekly episodes. I can still play, but I won’t worry about making videos unless I have something fun to share, and this time the art has to come first. I need to include art in each episode, even if it’s bad! LOL!

However, I did have an awesome update in that I finished my Max’s Town video. I did it as a timelapse, and I just love it! I loved the music and I loved the editing. It was such a big job in building and editing, but I love the result. And it’s so much fun walking the streets of the town in game. This is exactly what I had in mind when I thought of this channel. Taking concept art and building it in game. It was so much fun and I’m so proud of it. But, it was a huge job, and I probably won’t attempt something like that again.

What’s really fun is that once I made the decision to stop filming weekly, my art ideas exploded! I would go on hikes and come back with so many illustrations in mind. Things I want to draw to bring my own Minecraft worlds to life with characters and interactions, builds and history. I’m really excited about it.

Life Update

We took a few larger hikes this month. But, both hikes made me very sore! Honestly, I need to train a little better and do more leg days if I want to do hikes like that. And I need to find some more smaller hikes with hills closer to home to train my smaller balance muscles too. You end up using a lot of small muscles in your legs and core trying to keep upright on uneven terrain. Those muscles are a lot harder to train inside. I’ll need to incorporate some uneven hills into my walking just to build up that stability.

I only finished one book this month – The Wild Robot. It is written toward a very young kid age. It’s not really even good reading as an adult, it’s not like a YA novel, it’s really a chapter book to be read to young kids. But the illustrations are awesome! Each chapter has a greyscale illustration and the shape language and style of the illustrations is so good! It’s really a good lesson in how to convey a story in such simple illustrations. Really fun. So I’m keeping the book and might even buy the next ones.

And that’s a lot of updating, even when I thought I didn’t do much this month, so it’s good to have a review. I’ll also work on a review for all of 2025 and goals for 2026.