The way I titled this post implies that I’ll post one of these every week… I don’t think that’s feasible. I have most of the first week of January off so this week is already easier than every week which will follow this year. I think it’s more likely that I’ll try to summarise one or two weeks a month, or I’ll summarise a whole month of practice all at once. It will be difficult to find 15-30 minutes for art every day along with writing and blog management time.

But since I have the time now, I’ll detail how this first week of the Jacob Drawfee Schedule went for me.

Theme for week 1: Squirrels.

I have re-written this blog post 3 times.

I thought it would be easy, thought I could laugh in the face of game journalism. But instead I’ve spent the last 2 weeks being rather critical of game journalism and thinking about how it can even be possible to review games if you don’t finish them or physically have the time to play them to the end.

I would be a hypocrite to give a review for games I didn’t finish but also not finishing a game is generally a sign that I wasn’t really feeling it, which is a review in and of itself.

So I think the best way to approach this isn’t to say these are my reviews of games, but these are some games I loved and some I didn’t love so much in 2023 and that’s just one person's experience with them.

This end of year post is rather different from the reviews I’ve been writing. It’s more of a personal review of a journaling method I’ve been using this year to help manage multiple hobbies. If you are extremely minimalist while also loving to plan your life month by month, it could work for you too. But at the moment it’s extremely tailored to me of my kind-of hyper organised lifestyle.

This approach came about after multiple chats with my therapist of me complaining about how I have no time for hobbies and when I commit to one it feels like I lose the ability to stay interested in the rest. I often hyper focus on whatever activity currently has me in its grips. The other focus of this method was to help balance executive dysfunction when it comes to those “I would rather die” tasks. Things like phoning the doctor, filing medical papers, or chores that have been put off for months.

I used to set myself much loftier goals for books read during the year. But I also used to buy many more physical books. These days I’ve prioritised reading on a Kobo due to ease and space. I’ve moved 7 times in the last 12 years, books make up for a lot of weight. I’ve even started to take my books to one of those free micro libraries. Boxes on the side of the street where you can take or leave books. At least the ones I don’t see myself ever re-reading. It’s helped free up space for… newer books.

I paid around 80$ for a year subscription to 21 Draw, and it came with a free give away subscription which I was able to give to a friend. I had tried a few online learning programs over the years, more so when I was unemployed, but none with a year long commitment. I didn’t have any big plans for the year, I was going in with a kind of consistent job, a life still lived under semi-lockdown, and a longing to return to hobbies I’d struggled to get back into. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go but I had hoped that putting some money down would help motivate me, setting myself a goal of doing 1 course per month.

In the end, I finished 20 of the 24 courses I started.

There’s no way I could review all of them so I’m going to highlight my favourites in case anyone else wants to give 21Draw a chance.

October ended up being one of my busiest months of the year, which led to only sporadic 21 Draw lessons between travelling and playing Baldur’s Gate 3.

In December I plan to do a few end of year posts which means I want to try to cover the last 2 months of art practice in this post. So buckle in for some random courses and projects from the last 2 months.

A few months ago my girlfriend asked if I could draw a piece of art to be the image of a YouTube video for her music. She was composing a fight track for a D&D campaign I run and since I use Sync-Tube to sync music with my players during a game, uploading the track to YouTube was the easiest way to share it. But this meant having a visual aspect to the music as well.

An idea came to mind pretty quickly for this and I was able to put it almost all tonight in an evening. A large octopus with a sword fight with silhouettes of the characters from the campaign:

After getting through a large portion of the beginner level courses on 21 Draw, I finally felt like I could start dipping into the intermediate level courses. Starting with Aveline Stokart’s ‘Mastering Lighting and Shading’.

This is one of 21 Draws top highlighted courses, a large portion of it is even available for free on YouTube. Now that I’ve completed the whole thing it definitely deserves the top slot on the website and I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get more creative with lighting in their illustrations.

It starts by walking you through the basics of light and shadows on simple shapes. I always forget the specific names for different types of light and shadows so this was good for me, even if I’ve forgotten half of the names already. Then we did some studies of movie scenes to grasp light in action and after that Aveline provides a sketch that you then use to create 4 different lighting scenarios which is where the real takeaways come from.

While this is one of the most popular courses on 21 Draw I didn’t prioritise it. My interests had always been more around character design and creatures. But after branching out in a few other courses, I thought it would be time to keep trying to step out of my comfort zone.

This course is taught by Philip Sue and it looks like he has a lot of step by step process videos on his YouTube which likely cover a lot of the things covered in this course.

The mixed media course on 21 Draw launched a little over a month ago now. It’s their first mixed media course which was enough to make me want to give it a try. And it focused on strange creatures so it had a lot going for it in my eyes. It ended up being one of the more detailed courses I’ve taken so far.

The course is hosted by Eva Toorenent, an artist with a very unique approach to mixing watercolours with digital colouring. I’ve never done any serious watercolour practice before so I was excited at the possibility of learning a new medium.

Inspiration​

The first assignment of the course was 2 questions. I find these things rather cheesy and would usually skip them, but as I said in my previous blog post, doing these courses is my attempt to slow down and do the work.

Question 1: What gets you excited/happy? What can you talk about for hours? (5 sentences)