Yeah, I'm givin' up on Drawlloween/Inktober. I let myself get behind and now if I'm gonna catch up, it'll be at the expense of enjoying the last lil' bit of October! And I just can't do that, y'know? Already missing out on a few things with the car out of commission. Hell, that's probably the biggest hurdle right now. When you suddenly don't have a car, it takes about three-times as long to do anything or go anywhere. Anyway, quitting at 23 isn't all that bad. I feel like I did a lot better with the actual pictures this year, and I learned a lot of control and coloring techniques. How that's going to translate into digital work, I'll have to wait and see.

Speaking-of, I'm going to make a real effort to not take too long of a break and work hard over the next two months to practice what I need to. I still plan on starting work on my webcomic, Julie Aard: Security Guard at the start of next year. I'm not sure when it'll actually launch, but for now I'm hoping for sometime around May. This has been a project that's been on the back-burner for about four years now, and I've actually had to learn to draw from square-one to make it happen. I've really gone back and forth effort-wise this whole time, and I'm finally getting to a point where I'm not constantly disappointed in everything I make. So the last few months of this year (and probably the first of next) are going to be spent finalizing character designs, working on those basics that I still have trouble with, and figuring out the actual working process. I'm still going to be well below the quality I wanna be at when I start, but it sounds like every webcomic artist hates their first group of pages no matter what it looks like, so I might as well just jump in. That and learning by doing seems to work for me, once I force myself to stick with it. The biggest leaps in quality for me have been these daily drawing exercises.

Making a webcomic has been a dream of mine for over a decade now. Really. I remember reading comics like Mac Hall, Girly, and RPG World instead of studying in college. I even tried to learn to draw back then, but got nowhere. I'm really hoping 2020 will be the culmination of this long process. For now though, I'll be posting some occasional practice art, and concept work. Just hoping I can keep this level of motivation going.