Original Post: March 21

Not that much better than the first one, but, uh… better enough? Wolf heads are hard.

Original Post: October 11

The original was one of those pictures that seemed okay when I first did it, but slowly, over the course of days and weeks, I was beset by a creeping hatred. (Sometimes the opposite happens, too, but not nearly as often.) My poor Dee deserved better. He didn’t look nearly cocky enough before.

Also, as mentioned in the original post, this is a very old character of mine that dates back to high school. So ’cause it seems in the spirit of the month, for your entertainment, here’s a super old picture of the guy from 2004-ish. I was 16. Urgh, those clothes, I thought I was so cool…

Original Post: May 9

Kept the original design, mostly, a few tweaks. Just a new pose and style. I do most of my inking either by hand with a brushpen or digitally in Illustrator, but inking in Photoshop gives this messy, chunky kinda style that I’m starting to like.

Original Post: January 22

Why am I having so much fun with this style? Why can’t I stop? (I’ll use a different style tomorrow. Really. This one just cried out for it.)

Also, y’all should check out this blog. Emily Carroll and Vera Brosgol are two of my favourite artists and they are posting on ONE BLOG and it is almost too much to bear.

Thus comes the final month of my year-long experiment. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do this again next year – on one hand, it’s been great, pushing me to make something every day. (Except for those days when I get behind, but we’re not going to mention those. Again.) On the other hand, when I started it, I did so because I was spending a lot of time treading water as my career struggled to get off the ground. A year later, between illustration and design, I’m actually getting regular work – enough that I ought to concentrate on that, instead of on this. I have an illustration portfolio in desperate need of a revamp and some new content, a design portfolio sitting half-finished on my hard drive, and a dozen pictures that I want to do but haven’t had the chance. Not to mention that these were never supposed to take as long as they do – I often spend two or three or four hours on a piece. When I started, they were meant to be sketches, maybe half an hour. As with most things I do for any length of time, it got out of hand.

But that’s not the point! The point is that I have almost a whole year of art, and that’s almost a whole year of experience and experimentation. So for the month of December, I’m going to go back to some pics from the last 11 months that didn’t come out as nice as I’d like, and I’m going to revisit them, and see how well I do the second time around. A good way to cap off the year! Obviously some months lend itself to this better than others – by its nature, the entire month of July won’t be touched here – but this was pretty much the December plan from day one, and I still find it hard to believe that I’ve made it this far.

One month to go!