Retrospective for 2021

I started this blog on the Medium blogging platform in 2016 with no real focus other than talking about what I was doing with digital art at the time. It is pretty much my only pastime not that I don’t have aspirations to be an intrepid jungle explorer looking for ancient ruins, but we’ll leave that to the fictional characters for now.

I come from a traditional 2D art background so digital painting was my original focus in the world of digital art which I’ve been doing since 2004. Digital painting is still something I like to do. I still strive to learn new things and try different software on occasion. After so many years I think it is natural to want to try other things or you can get bored and stale. I became more interested in learning how to do 3D art so I began writing about that as well.

They say (whoever “they” are) that you should find a niche and focus. Over the years I must admit I have been really bad at doing that. I do feel like I’m settling into a preferred way of working and I have decided to experiment with different software less as it takes too much time.

I went through a stage where I wanted to try lots of different things, perhaps inspired by the foundation art course I did in 2014 where we tried many different art mediums. It was very good for my creativity after years and years of only doing digital painting and drawing with cheap writing pens and mechanical pencils.

I thought I would apply the same logic to the digital medium by exploring different things and mixing it with the traditional art and 3D art more. This approach did help re-invigorate my interest and I found some interesting techniques like using G’MIC and pencil textures.

Now I am at a crossroads again where I’m wondering what direction to go in for this blog. My interest in 3D art is becoming stronger and I find it fun and challenging to do. I like mixing 2D and 3D. Perhaps that is where I should focus going forward. I think the 2D art skills are still relevant for creating concept ideas and texture painting, so I will write more about that side of things as well. Whether it leads to anything I have no idea, but it is better than being bored.

I’m also considering doing more “fan art”, for the 3D art practice side of things. I see the value of doing it to practice skills and learn about design from professional examples. I’m not really a fan of any particular thing, but I’ll start with things I used to like from my childhood and go from there.

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