Happy Spooky Month, aka my favorite time of the year. Every year I get so hyped up, wanting to marathon a bunch of horror movies, draw Halloween-themed stuff, etc. etc., aaaaaand usually I wind up doing nothing in the end. Hoping to change that this year, I REALLY wanna draw some monster girls or something just to get myself in the mood.

I'm ngl, September sucked ass for me. I got laid off from my job of five years and spent the entire rest of the month job searching and dealing with unemployment bullshit. Got incredibly stressful as I continued getting auto-rejection after auto-rejection for both the job applications, and unemployment (haven't received a single penny of help from them), but I'm very relieved to say that I landed a job to start October and my stress levels are already plummeting.

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With all those real-life worries fading, I can once again get back to work on my art. I've got a Jason Voorhees piece I need to get done by Halloween for the Slasher Collab, I've got a Mileena piece that's pretty close to done (though I'm pumping the breaks on it, because I really want to break my bad habit of rushing through pieces and also of posting art that's just a character in an empty flat-color void), and I've got a few peoples' OCs that I wanna try my hand at with some fanart.

I am rapidly approaching the 50 follower milestone that I'd made my goal for the year when I regained access to this account back in May. I'm pretty sure this is already the farthest I've gotten with a NG account, so every new follow is a new milestone I'm reaching. Hope to have some good new art to share with you all very soon, and hope you'll stick around to see it! Happy Spooky Month! 🎃

Last month was pretty uneventful, so I didn't wind up making a journal post for it. September has already made up for August's uneventfulness, for better or worse.

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To start, I decided to get my ass back to animating (finally) with my latest post;

Nothing crazy, in fact I intentionally tried making something really simple, just to bolster my confidence again and give myself a refresher on Clip Studio Paint. From start to finish, it wound up only taking two nights, which is huge for me. Definitely hoping to get a lot more animation practice in, since I'm gonna need it for my next bit of news.

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I'll be participating in the FOX Kids, Jetix & FOX Box animation collab that'll be happening in 2027. Already signed up and got my subject picked out: Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm. I've never actually seen the show myself, but I've been on a big arcade-era MK deep-dive going back to that Mileena pic I did, so it feels like a perfect excuse for me to give it a watch and make something parodying it. Truth be told, I already have an incredibly stupid punchline planned out, I think it's gonna be a ton of fun. It's sure to be the longest and most complicated animation I've done to date, but I'm up for the challenge!

I'll also be participating in the Neopets collab in December. I've always wanted to try getting more involved in the NG community, and I'm hoping these projects help set that in motion. I love this site and wanna start getting the true experience out of it rather than just showing up and posting art every once in a while.

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Anyway, that'll about do it for this journal post. Hope you guys enjoyed finally seeing what my art looks like in motion, and hope you'll stick around to see more stuff from me in the near-future!

Ayyy, I hit 25 followers! Thanks a ton for the support! :) Now seems like as good a time as any for a little update, so here goes;

I've felt satisfied with my productivity these past few months, but I don't think I can say I'm happy with the art I've put out. I've been challenging myself knowing that I'm very out of practice, and I've been coming away from each finished piece feeling like I could do so much better if I just studied and practiced regularly, as well as practiced better habits as an artist. As things are now, there's pretty much no art happening between projects, and I know that that's not healthy for growth. My current process is pretty much to just blast through a project with next to no planning or rough drafting. I did a lot better with my last piece, making multiple drafts and getting as much feedback as possible on each draft, but I know I could have done so much more planning to make the piece better than it wound up being.

I think I want to do a big reset on my creative process, including doing some serious studying on the areas that I know I need improvement. Digital painting is what I'm currently looking at focusing on, and I already found a good resource with lots of video lessons on the subject. I'm not sure what this will mean for my productivity as far as posting regularly goes, but my top priority is growing my skillset. We'll see where these thoughts lead me. Thanks again for the support, and for sticking around to read this little update. Until the next one, take care!

I'm gonna try to get into the habit of making these every once in a while.

It's been about a month and a half since I started over from scratch on this new (old) account. So far, I'd say that things are going pretty well! I've been on my biggest productivity streak with my art in years. Here's some nutty stats; the last time I posted at least one finished piece of art in back-to-back months was in March of 2022. My last three-month streak was in September of 2019, and to get to my last four-month streak, you'd have to go all the way back to 2014. As of right now, I'm on a two-month streak with a piece currently in the works that will extend that to three months.

One finished piece a month probably sounds pathetic to any serious artist, and that's totally fair. The reality is that I have not been a "serious artist" in a long time. I'd say that my passion for art peaked in my teens, but then fizzled out in the transition to adulthood. I've started and stopped many times, trying to get my passion back to where it once was. As I said in my previous news post, I feel like regaining this account (which coincided with me starting to get back into the habit of drawing regularly) sparked a fire in me that makes me want to make up for lost time and really start to do everything I can to level up my abilities to where I feel I should be at, considering I've been making art for well over half my life now. Right now my biggest priority is simply building the habit of drawing back up. As a piece of advice that I love says; "Make it exist first. Make it pretty later."

I'm going to be attending a few nerd cons in the coming weeks, and am planning my next couple of illustrations as prints that I'll (hopefully) get signed by the actors who play the respective characters I'll be drawing. As such, you can expect art of Kayako from the Ju-on/The Grudge series, Jason Voorhees, and MAYBE Baragon from the Godzilla series if I have the time for it.

I try not to get hung up on numbers, but in just a month and a half, this account's already at close to half the amount of followers that I amassed on my last account, which I'd been using for almost two years. I attribute that to how much more productive I've been on this new account, and I'm hoping that in keeping up that momentum, I can make this my first NG account to crack 100 followers. That's my big goal for this year. Thanks for all the support thus far, expect more art very soon! :)

WOW.

I'd gotten the random urge to check my old usernames that I've gone by over the years to see if there were any surviving accounts that I forgot about, and not only did I find one, I found one under THE oldest username I ever used! I first started posting my art online on deviantART sometime in mid-late 2009, and it looks like I made this account half a year before even that! (I would have been 12!) Granted, it doesn't look like I ever posted anything here, but it is a crazy time capsule to a time when I would have first started using the internet, and also right around the time I decided that I want to spend my life making cartoons.

Probably sounds overly sentimental, but I really do feel like I regained a lost part of me in getting this account back. I don't think I've done the best job in living up to the hopes and aspirations that the 12 year old that made this account had imagined, but this whole experience makes me want to start making up for lost time.

Massive thanks to the Newgrounds Support Team for helping me regain access, you guys are the best.