Happy new year everyone! I might be a little late for this sort of thing, but I wanted to do a little summary of everything that's happened this year for the heck of it. I won't be going into too many details, as I want to have something to talk about for the end of the Daily Drawing challenge in about a month and a half from now, so I'll be just covering things very briefly.

With all that said, here's my late little summary of 2021:

But first a little context (sorry): At the end of 2020 I decided to move out of my parent's house to live on my own. It was a thing I did because I was a sick and tired of doing nothing all day, and I wanted to get out there on my own and prove to my parent's that I was capable of doing things by myself.

~Jan 2021~

So I wasn't able to get a job, my own computer repair business was barely moving, I quit the art class I signed-up for last year, and was barely able to pay rent. Luckily the money I'd receive from the government every month was just enough to pay for that apartment, but then I only had $20 left for the groceries and other things. My mother did support me by at least paying for my groceries every month.

This whole moving-out thing kind-of felt like a mistake, especially with this whole virus thing that was still going on, but unlike living with my parents I was actually doing things and not sitting around playing games or tinkering around with Linux all day.

~Feb 2021~

It was just another typical boring day until I decided to watch a compilation of animations this little artist called Telepurte did for a year. I watched the whole thing in almost a whole sitting, and it gave a new motivation in life. For almost my whole life I've been wanting to become a programmer, but now more than ever I wanted to become an artist, and draw something, every, single, day, for a whole year!

Now I did have an interest in doing art before with Bob Ross in 2020, but the art class I took with an ex-Bob Ross instructor was not good, and discouraged me from doing more art until I saw said video.

So I grabbed a stack of printer paper, a cheap mechanical pencil, placed my oversized folding table in front of a window, and started drawing.

I had no idea what I was doing when I first started, but I knew where I wanted to go and I wasn't going to give-up. I also wanted to keep this whole thing private, until Day 25 where I thought it would be cool to upload what I've done everyday to Twitter.

~Mar 2021~

My computer business started picking-up some steam at around this time, but I didn't feel like my heart was into repairing computers anymore. I just wanted to isolate myself and continuously draw.

At this point in time I only knew how to draw my character using shapes, but I slowly started using lines for things like hands. I tried using things like mannequins for poses, but they were just frustrating to use, so I just grabbed my nearest camera and took pictures of myself (I still do that to this day)

~Apr 2021~

I decided to close-down my computer business and go full-time into drawing. It was a bit of a risky move, but I already had everything covered. My apartment was completely payed with the government money, and my mother helped me with the groceries (which was only the necessities with a few treats, I didn't want to exploit my mother).

By now I was starting to run-out of ideas for poses, so I decided to do exercise poses, and I jokingly played Wii-Fit to get ideas for these poses...but then the joke became serious, and now I play Wii-Fit for half an hour everyday (when I can) just to get a little more movement, and to lose a little bit of weight.

Later-on I also gave-up on using shapes entirely, and focusing only on simplifying things into lines

~May 2021~

Things were already starting to take shape with my art: I gave-up using shapes to build my characters and used lines instead, I created new eyes for my character so he could emote a little more, and I designed new shoes too because the old ones were a pain to draw. But now another thing was starting to bother me. For a while now I've been visiting my parents every two weeks, and that small disturbance was enough to knock me out and I just didn't want to draw, but I had to. After all, that was the challenge.

This was also the start of the special milestone drawings. Even though I didn't really have too many people following me on Twitter, I wanted a reason to potentially get more attention, and it was a good way to put what I've learned to the test.

~Jun 2021~

Things were continuously getting better with my art. I created a new OC (Nothany), I was in the process of creating a female OC (Lunaic), and I saved-up some money and bought a drawing tablet. The downside is my mother's boyfriend broke-up and left her a little homeless for a while. This wasn't the first boyfriend my mother broke-up with, but my god was this one the toughest on my side. I needed to help-out my mother for a good while, while also finding enough time to draw something for the day. I knew this challenge was going to be tough, but this was not what I was expecting.

~Jul 2021~

First all digital month! After drawing exclusively on paper for a long time, I felt ready to go digital. The switch was surprisingly easy, but the feel was different. Though, now that I could play with colour I could be a lot more creative with my work. The only problem now was the 24-hour time limit, I was too slow to draw what I wanted before the day was over.

~Aug 2021~

Throughout this challenge so far, I had almost never gotten close to running-out of time to complete any drawing. This is the first drawing where I was unable to complete in a day, and so began the birth of the side project. Where I complete a bigger drawing while doing my usual drawings everyday.

At this point I had finally created my first female character, but everything was still a little rough with her design.

~Sep 2021~

September was a bit of a break month. Things were just getting a little hectic with me still helping my mother pack things up. I also almost missed my 7 month milestone, and instead of doing a grand drawing I just did a quick comic while nearly falling asleep. But this month was a little special in its own way, as it was the birth of my rabbit OCs (Holrad & Rathrie). These came about after just getting bored of constantly drawing my other OCs and wanting something radically different.

~Oct 2021~

This month was really special for me. Not only was it the first time I started feeling really proud of my progress, and the characters I've created, but it was also when I first joined Newgrounds (took a while eh?). Twitter was nice when I used it, but it didn't feel like anyone was really seeing my art (even now), and I couldn't really organize my art very well on there either.

I was always going to join Newgrounds, but what made me want to do it back then was because Facebook temporarily shut-down their servers causing tons of traffic on Twitter. I was a little worried that Twitter might shut-down due to the traffic, so I created this Newgrounds account in case, but then I decided to transfer all my art (which was a pain in the ass because I was at Day 250) and use Newgrounds in tandem with Twitter.

~Nov 2021~

At around this time I started asking around for art tips in the Newgrounds forums, and a couple people did help me out quite a bit to point me in the right directions. One of these tips was to draw more fan-art to help me find my style, so I drew fan-art of the first artist that caught my attention on Newgrounds: @Grasskip. As of writing this little fan-art I did is STILL the only drawing that has gotten any sort of serious attention, and I'm never sure whether I should feel proud or frustrated about this.

~Dec 2021~

And here we are now. The final month of 2021. This was the most stressful month of my entire challenge thus far, and most of it was because of one bad decision: I decided to do THREE drawings at once! The standard daily drawing, my monthly drawing, and the Newgrounds Secret Santa, all on the busiest month of the year...my god! Never again!

~Plans for the future~

My challenge will end sometime in February of this year, and all throughout this year I've been thinking of how I should continue this whole thing, I think the best thing to do is draw parts of drawing everyday (sketch one day, do lineart on another, and then colour it the day after), take the weekends off, open a Ko-Fi account for tips, and do commissions and prints (with the help of my uncles) on the side. I would have done Patreon, but I don't really know how to split my rewards in a per month format. I also want to invest in a new computer (this Thinkpad T420 is starting to show its age a little), and dive into animations too! I can't wait to see how much my art will improve in this brand new year!

And thank you for reading my unnecessarily long essay (I try to keep it short I swear).

Hope this year will be great!