Hey there folks,

( disclaimer for non FA people: this journal is a bit unfitting for my weasyl&sofurry galleries, given that i haven't figured out a comfortable and not confusing way to handle distributing commissions on all, so commissions were FA only. But anyway, wanted to bring those galleries to the same standarts, soooo, all journalls it is! )

let's try something crazy today! An audio journal ! I think my journals tend to be a bit on the lengthy side , so i wanted to try out an alternative to people who don't have time to read through it, or don't want to at that point because they have other journals waiting or whatever it may be!
It covers pretty much the same stuff, so just pick whether you want to read or listen i guess, and let me know if that is an idea worth doing more regularly! Since cutting the downtime, re-recording parts i messed up and so on actually takes quite a bit of time if you don't know what you are doing! The recording also is a tiny bit to quiet i think, this will probably be different for everyone depending how the sounds settings are arranged, but i'll try to make that better the next time around.

The link to find it is : https://soundcloud.com/nomax-1/audio-journal-2014-02-01

Now to the text part:

another Month has passed, and it comes at exactly the right time, since i actually have stuff to talk about! Woho!!
Alright, let's start at the commission part, since that is probably the most important one for some people, and there is one positive thing to talk about and one negative one:
So, positive first i guess, which admittedly is the less important and interesting one : I've recently switched around to instead of taking a commission a month, to taking 3 at once, and overall this was a fantastic decision. I have less downtime where it isn't really long enough to start something serious, like i had back with only one commission, and was waiting for people to answer notes. This is not meant as a complaint to people that commissioned me at that time for them being to slow or whatever, it's just the nature of communication over the internet. So, the 3 commissions at once were perfect to get rid of that problem, i can switch around whenever i feel stuck on one commission, and i can also fill those waiting periods easily, so the multiple commissions at once system is here to stay.

Now to the negative one: I'll stop commissions for the moment. The current ones obviously will still be carried out, but i won't open for new ones like i wanted to, i'm sorry for anyone who was holding out to grabbing a spot. The reason for that is that i am currently not satisfied with what i do artistically, not in the sense of it being bad, quite the opposite, while i haven't made much progress over the last year there is progress still. I think the last few commissions were rather good, and i feel i've given my best for them, and i also hope that the people who have commissioned them feel the same. Though i feel i could be much better and the commissions are holding that progress back to a degree, because obviously i have to be more conservative with those, and stay true to things i know work out, and not instead experiment to much. So that's essentially what it boils down to, me wanting to take some time to better myself .

Now, i already had one offtime a little more than a year ago, and if i remember correctly it resulted in even less activity for my gallery, which is extremely bad given that i already am not so meone who is particularly fast, with about 1~2 pictures per month on average. So i want to try and avoid that and have a few ideas on my mind:

1. study paintings that i think are worth sharing are an obvious one i suppose, though i would have to decide which are worth after the fact, since i think adding the pressure of having to produce something worth showing off is detrimental to studying, since it makes you afraid to do mistakes. Though that would mean for it to likely be a rather inconsistent flow. So i doubt this would carry it alone.

2. Some sort of compilation, maybe kind of like the art summary, putting 2~5 studies together in one commission, which could make it easier to pick studies given that none of them have to carry it alone.

and 3. This is probably the most elaborate one, but probably also the most interesting one, and that is to put together sort of like smaller tutorials every now and then, talking about the topics at hand, reflecting on them and maybe sparking ides and discussions along the way. So far i shied away from doing tutorials because i am still learning myself, and there would likely be mistakes in them, so i never saw a reason in doing them given that there are books and tutorials from far more skilled artists, which would render my stuff moot anyway. But i think with the study related stuff it could work, that was it wouldn't be a defintive tutorial, but more like a train of thoughts and a conversation about a topic.

More than likely it probably will be a mix of all of them, depending on what feels right at that moment, but i wanted to hear what you guys think about it! Do any of you have improvements and suggestions for those three things? Do you maybe have completely different ideas that you would like to see and that i could mix into there? If so then feel free to tell me, if it is something fitting and i can do it then i'll try to do it.

I think that's all for now, this month no artist of the month or game stuff. I think the journal is long enough as it is already , and in the end the second part wasn't all that negative i think. I have a tendency to just keep writing and writing :P

Regards,

Nomax