Winter Holidays, Year 2: Looking Back and Goals for 2015

I am now half way through my degree. The realisation hit me like a ton of bricks; I can't believe how quickly the time has gone by.

If I had to sum up my year of art in 1 word, that word would be 'experimental'. It's been a year of trying new techniques and mediums. Even exploring other fields; such as animation.

Beara Peninsula, virtual plein air experiment.

This year, during the summer, I tried oil painting for the first time. I also started getting into the habit of carrying a sketch book around and drawing from life in my free time.

I loved oil painting, and it's definitely something I will continue to develop in the future. Drawing from life however is an incredibly valuable exercise and a great thing to do, so I'll definitely endeavour to ramp that up this year.

 Way of St. James photobash.

More recently, I had my first crack at starting an environment piece with a photobash. I didn't take it through to a finished painting, but I did end up using it as reference for a drawing, which proved very useful. It's definitely a great technique for getting a piece off the ground.

I've also been really pleased with my life drawing progress this year. Choosing to keep it up over summer was a brilliant decision and I feel I've made some real progress.

Life drawing progress, winter 2013 > winter 2014.

So looking back, I've had a pretty good year. I've tried a lot of new things and grown a lot as a result of it. However there are some shortcomings to my 2014. While I did a fair bit of work, I could have done a lot more. Most of all, I feel I didn't produce a lot of my best, most polished work, particularly with my 3D, probably as a direct result of doing a lot of experimental projects. Going into 2015, I intend to rectify that and prioritise polished, portfolio worthy work instead.

I'm not one for making New Year's resolutions. Of course, there are many things I'd like to improve in my life. I could be healthier. I could work harder. I could learn any number of new things. But for a resolution to have even a remote chance of success, one needs to consider 'what is this going to replace in my day to day routine, in terms of time, energy and willpower?'

With that in mind, I have a few...'goals' shall we say, for 2015:

• I will read more. I'd like to read more non-fiction, art related material during the day and more fiction books in the evenings. I currently spend most of my breaks during the day browsing sites like reddit. During the evenings I do the same or watch TV shows. I'd like to do less of that this year, particularly before bed, even if just for the sake of a better night's sleep.
• My work day is 8 hours long. Currently this is 10-18:00 but it may change. The point is maintaining an explicit start and stop time. This should create guilt free hours for personal projects and most importantly, help maintain sanity.
• Keep blogging, but spend less time on it. I'm really proud of my blog and how far it's come. Particularly being able to (mostly) keep up with weekly posts this past term. But it's currently very time consuming, 1 post equates to about 12 hours of work. So I will keep posting weekly, but reduce the time cost. Consequently the word count may shrink, or the style may change but hopefully, there will be more art!

If I can stick to even one of those I'll be happy, but they're all very achievable. And with that, I hope you all had an excellent holiday and you're as excited for this year as I am. Here's to a great year ahead!