2014 RECAP

Here we go again, another year over! Can’t believe it. 2014 was a massive roller-coaster year for me. I look at it as the year of change, so much happened, not just in my art but in my personal life too!

• I stepped out of my comfort zone and started going to Art Classes
• started Life Drawing classes
• started sketching people in public
• faced my fears and took the tone of my Artwork darker
• started tackling my Anxiety
• started meditating, changing my whole outlook on life
• accepted myself as being Transgender
• met one of my inspirational Artists DestinyBlue at Comic Con and got a signed print from her
• started to learn figure drawing and perspective
• redesigned my whole website
• had cosplayers Liz Katz and Amy Thunderbolt personally contact me to say how much they liked the drawings I did of them

…that’s just some of my highlights from 2014, but my ultimate achievement was accepting myself as being Transgender. If you had said to me at the start of 2014 that by the end of the year I would not only have accepted the truth, but would have fully embraced it and shared it with all my family and the entire world … I would never have believed you. This is why life is so cool, you can never predict what’s going to happen :)

My overall goals for 2014 when I started the year were

April 2014 | Finish the Portrait book I’m currently studying from (SUCCESS, wrote a review of the book in April)
April 2014 – September 2014 | Start learning Figure Drawing (SUCCESS, perspective, Life Drawing classes and daily gesture drawing)
September 2014 time | Start to introduce colour into my artwork via Coloured Pencils (NOT SUCCESSFUL)

I managed to successfully complete the first two goals, and while I did sketch in colour from time to time, I never started to introduce colour into my main artwork for various reasons, but overall I am very happy with how I met my 2014 goals and how much I changed personally. Figure drawing is a lot more then simply reading a book and being able to do it, it’s going to take time, dedication and patience. I imagine colour theory will be along the same lines. Just looking back at 2014 I can see that you can plan as much as you like, but life evolves in ways you can’t imagine, so the following 2015 goals are just an outline

My current overall goals for 2015

• Start adding colour to my Artwork
• Continue studying Figure Drawing
• Dedicated time for modelling photos once a month
• Start entering Art Competitions

I will still be producing graphite pencil portraits and animals, but I intend to start adding colour and figure drawing to my work. For studying Figure Drawing I plan to continue my daily gesture drawing practice with QuickPoses.com, continue my Life Drawing classes once a week, but also add in 1 hour dedicated to Prokos Figure Drawing videos each day, in much the same way I did with Marshell Vandruffs Perspective videos this year. I hope to study from the following books and resources –

BOOK | Lifelike drawing in Colored Pencil by Lee Hammond
BOOK | Colored Pencil Painting Bible by Alyona Nickelsen
BOOK | Colour Mixing Bible by Ian Sidaway
DVD | Lee Hammond’s Lifelike Drawing in Colored Pencil
DVD | Lee Hammonds Draw Faces in Colored Pencil

I personally enjoyed Lee Hammond’s style of teaching so much, in How to draw LIFELIKE PORTRAITS from PHOTOGRAPHS, that I decided to give her coloured pencils books and DVDs a try. For pencils I will be using Prismacolor Premier and Faber-Castell, together with Derwent inktense watersoluble ink pencils. I feel using coloured pencils to start learning colour theory will be best for me, as I hope it will allow me to focus on understanding how colour works, without having to wrestle with trying to understand how paints work at the same time. By introducing water colour pencils later on, I feel like I can get my feet wet (hopefully not literally lol) semi painting before moving onto oil painting in the future.

I also want to give a massive shout out to Jonathan Rector, he doesn’t know it, but he has helped me so much over the past 2 years with his YouTube videos. Every time I sketch I have his videos on in the background; I can’t sketch without him now. It’s a nice comforting feeling having Jonathan Rector talking while I’m sketching, he’s such a nice bloke, very motivating. So thank you Jonathan!

My “outside of my comfort zone” goal for 2014 was to start going to Art Class, I started the year thinking I could/would never be able to do that so I actually didn’t even list it as a goal. However, I forced myself to go in February 2014 and honestly, I think it was the best thing I ever did. I love going to Art Class now, other Artists seem to be so friendly and helpful, I just love being around them! So my “out of my comfort zone” goal for 2015 is to actually start entering Art Competitions. When I think about doing that, I get a little bit scared, but I remember a quote

“THE SIZE OF YOUR DREAMS MUST ALWAYS EXCEED YOUR CURRENT CAPACITY TO ACHIEVE THEM. IF YOUR DREAMS DO NOT SCARE YOU, THEY ARE NOT BIG ENOUGH.”
– Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

As for my actual Artwork, all my personal work in 2015 I intend to be based around femininity, with the hopes of one day bring some of my modelling photos to life via paintings. This is my current blueprint for 2015, but as I always say, things change … so in a way, I am also prepared to just go with the flow and see what happens.