This year I gave myself a personal challenge to take a step back from my normal work and into a different for myself. Swapping from Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint wasn’t too difficult but I needed a non serious side project to really cut my teeth on the new software. Though it’s more cartoony than I would like, I tried to do it in the style or spirit of the website Neopets. This also pushed my comfort zone since I felt like I was always too hard on myself for a more cartoony like style.

Each image was drawn with a total time between 1 and 4 hours (if it had a more complex background, give or take).

I chose 31 different subject matters from the website Neopets with the goal of getting into their Art Gallery. I had an initial goal of 10 times. That came and went rather quickly as the year unfolded. I raised the bar to 15 and hit it in the span of 2 months later. For my final bar I set it at 20 -only to exceed that again to end up with 23 winning digital images for the year.

I tried a lot of different things in the beginning until I finally figured out a style and formula I liked for an overall look for the collection.

I learned alot from this small experiment and look forward to returning to my normal work with some new skills under my belt in 2023.