Honestly surprised that this is 4 for 4 this month. Maybe I can do a blog post every week. Though I suspect committing to extremely minimal social time for January and my workplace being a disaster has contributed to having enough time to pull it off.

Anyway, I hope you like looking at hands. I don’t find them as exciting as pigeons or squirrels but after a few weeks of easy-ish creatures I wanted to try something that would be a serious push. And which would be applicable to more art pieces. I have an animation I’ve been working on that’s taken twice as long because of how much time I’ve spent fighting with the hands. Ended up going with a very blob like shape in the end just to keep making progress. Time to see if a week of hands can carry me through drawing more hands in the future.

Another week of having a good amount of time to devote to art. Huion tablet setup is reliable once more and now I don’t need to fight with making sure the pressure settings are working every time I turn it on.

Pigeons are the 3rd most common creature on our back patio so this is a creature a see regularly, unlike the pangolin. Love to see him, love when they awkwardly try to cling to the trellis.

A wild week at work resulted in me spending most of my evenings trying not to think about it by drawing. So here are a bunch of sketches of pangolins.

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: