Category: Monthly Review

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.

I’m writing this in December because it’s been a bit of a hectic few months. We had multiple kitty emergency room visits and multiple human emergency room visits. The human (my husband) is doing well now, but we have some longer-term medical things we’ll need to keep watch on. And sadly, it was time to say good bye to our little ornery kitty. She had such strong character, she was well loved and will be much missed.

We like adopting older kitties and she came into our life at the age of 14 after her person died, and was with us for only 3 years, but it was a wonderful 3 years for her and us.

With all this going on, Minecraft was a good distraction and retreat. I had fun escaping into making simple cute builds and having a nice, calm world to retreat to.

But, my art practice really took a hit. I barely did any work in October and November. I’m trying to pick things back up how and get a regular practice going again. Art is not easy for me, it’s difficult, so it’s a hard thing to pick up sometimes. But I feel like I have more time and energy now, so more art is coming soon.

Well, yikes. I wanted September to be a bit of a reset, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Art Update

I was still stuck on the gesture drawing class. I really think the class was geared to people with much more experience. Each lesson was really tough and would break my confidence. I stopped trying to write up each class with notes and examples. I’m just not able to do things at that level. And having that over my head meant that I practiced less and less. So, I watched the rest of the lessons, took some notes, and I’ll call it good. I’ll try moving on to the next class.

I did a rework of my character drawing. It came out ok. Pretty good. I still have a lot to learn, but it was ok. I liked it well enough to use it as my profile picture for YouTube.

Strategy for October:

• plan my day to get a lesson in Monday to Friday
• work through next class, and circle back to previous lessons too
• sketch daily, even if it’s just a very rough pencil sketch.
• go ahead and post daily to the website. That was working better for me. I was going to try occasional updates in September, but they obviously didn’t happen.

Life Update

I will again take a break from social media (Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, also Discord). I have already setup all my browsers to limit those sites. But I need to respect that and stop going there. I have been super-scrolling lately with all the news going on, and it’s just not helping me. I need to take at least two weeks off, just as a reset. Once I do that, I won’t even feel like scrolling.

This also needs to include YouTube. I’ll go back to my August project of only checking for new videos on Saturdays and planning my viewing from that. I also need to watch my own videos for quality, but I can do that while knitting! 🙂  I’m doing too much scrolling and watching on YouTube too. So let’s take a break.

Even for my Minecraft video channel, it needs to be lower priority. Part of the reason for the new series is to make videos that are not as big. I need to get back to that mindset. I keep making big plans instead of just going with the flow of things. So, less time spent on planning.

What will I replace this time with? sketching, reading, knitting and sewing! I was making a lot of progress on a blanket until lately, so I can get back to that. It’s very soothing.

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:

I want to start doing monthly reviews just to reflect on the month, what work I did, and reflect on anything I would do different. To kick off, I’ll do a review of my year so far, ups and downs.

In late December 2024, I decided to take my art lessons more seriously and track my time, trying to do a lesson per day. I was inspired by the YouTube channel 10,000 hours who is doing a project of tracking lessons daily. He is currently in the 500 hour range, and it’s easy to see his improvement. I tried doing the same, but could still only do about 12-13 lessons per month.

In May, I started the Character tract at SVS, and it really has been throwing me off. I never wanted to learn to draw characters, but in December, when I knew I was going to be part of Arcadia, I suddenly decided to learn to draw characters to make art for my friends that I play Minecraft with. But, learning to draw people was all new, I have never tried it before and it was really, really hard. Then I hit a class where the instructor assumed that you could draw basic faces, and I hit a wall. I couldn’t do it.

I went searching for other classes, books, videos, for learning to draw heads and faces. I settled on learning from Chrissa Barton. She has a series of art instruction books for learning to draw RPG characters, and I really like how she teaches. So, I was able to get some basic cartoon face style going, and could keep going with SVS. I’m trying to get back into drawing daily.

I’m going to try to develop two different styles, one, a more simplified, stylized cartoon style for ‘fan art’ drawing and possible animation? Another style I would like to develop is more like Chrissa’s which is a prettier, more romantic style of digital RPG art. There are several artists using this for things like Hermitcraft fan art, so I would fit in there. I also still want to develop watercolor styles in both traditional and digital art for house drawing. It’s a lot to learn and develop. But that will all be fun.