Back to the Drawing Board

 

I've been doing a lot of end-of-year revising of my work lately - some of this is because I'm in the middle of Old Skies, and the middle of a project is where the sheen of a "new thing" has dissipated a little, and the job is largely production work rather than creative solving problems, some of it being because Nighthawks is going to soon be at the point where I need to go back and polish things, cast an eye over everything I've already done and fill in the missing pieces that we didn't know were missing, and I need to have my critical glasses on in order to polish that project up the way it deserves.

The tough part about this sort of revision is that usually with a few months of space between the creation of a piece of work I can see the flaws that I was happy to ignore at the time, and while this can be a little frustrating and also generates a need to quickly touch up endless amounts of work, it's also satisfying because it feels like this is the right mindset for growing & learning. I've got a couple of months of pretty hefty study planned to fill in some of my massive weak areas, especially after a year of pretty solid production work, and my brain has never felt more ready to tackle some specific elements of technique & knowledge that have intimidated me in the past. By the end of a study block like that I'm always absolutely ready to take a break from learning things and just get down to production, too, which is also a great thing.

For now, here's an old study piece I did a couple of years ago that I liked well enough to touch up just a tiny bit tonight. Been too long since I did this sort of thing. Thanks for all the support this year, and here's to a wonderful 2023 for us all.