I recently wrote a blog post about my journey of the past year, but I wanted to take a moment to go over my plans for the year to come with you guys.

2015 was a huge year for me in terms of artistic development, and of figuring out what I needed to do to make my art work as an actual business for me, too: And this is the year that I act on that and try to really just make this all work. Over the past couple of years I've taken part time jobs here and there as I need them, but I hope to be able to scrape by well enough to at least sustain my own expenses, which is no small feat.

But I have artistic and project goals which are not so business-y or financial, too; I have plans to really continue developing my two major personal projects. Starting in two weeks, I'll be mentoring with Brad Kunkle, who I met at IMC last year and who is one of my major influences for my Holding Back Birds painting. I'll be using this opportunity to really devote my time to continuing that body of work, creating more paintings exploring trans and non-binary figures, and doing so in oil painting. I've been learning more about the medium here and there over time, but really diving into it with big pieces is still a super intimidating prospect! Still, I'm excited; I have so many ideas for this body of work and the process of conversing with people to learn and understand others' experiences is super rewarding on it's own merit.

I also have goals relating to my personal project, Firebloods, but I'll have to save that for another journal update next month...

Right now, I'm in the middle of crunching on personal work, trying to get my short comic Sever and a couple additional illustrations-in-progress done by specific deadlines to order prints in time for my conventions in March. It's a lot of stress and pressure-- my own aspirations for how much work I want to get done vs how much I'm actually able to sanely accomplish is something I wrestle with constantly. But in a few weeks that will all be over, and I'll be time to step out and do those cons... I've learned before, that even if I don't manage to accomplish 100% of the things I feel compelled to, that everything will still go well and I'll learn and grow from the experiences. I'm so excited to get out there in person with my work and I can't wait to meet some of you there!

I'll be posting another journal next week going over commission info and what that's going to look like for the next few months-- so keep an eye out for that! Thanks all!

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