HELLO SUMMER (WHERE’D YOU COME FROM?)
And I thought April was a blur… Turns out that animated project I was working on ended up consuming my life (work and personal) for about 3 weeks. Then,on the morning I delivered it to the client, I jumped on a plane (with 1.5 hours of sleep) and was out of town on a business trip for a week.
Poof. There went May.
Painful, but definitely a learning experience. For example:
- I learned that I have 3 gears. I can continue to work ridiculously hard for a ridiculous amount of time, pushing through exhaustion levels for about a week to a week and a half, but then my body has to crash and get a full night’s sleep before starting the process again.
- It’s absolutely not worth it. After spending pretty much the last month of the school year (the last year of elementary for my boys) not seeing my family outside of meal times (3 of those weeks with me actually being home, just locked in my home office), it was glaringly clear to me that better scheduling, planning, and client communication would have been way more effective. Extended crunch times do not work for a family man. I’ve worked pretty hard to get better at time and project management on the personal level – now I just need to force those healthy habits and boundaries into my professional life. Fingers crossed.
That being said, I’m extremely happy with the end product (and so was the client). Here’s the completed animation from my favorite sequence of the project:
COMIC PROJECTS UPDATE
That big animation project derailed my project calendar so thoroughly that the only way to get things back on track is to reschedule some projects. And the bigger the project, the bigger the delay.
Unfortunately, this means that I’ll need to push production on “Jupiter IX” to January 2025. This, of course, sucks, but is the right thing to do. It’s waited this long, so I’m not going to try to jam it into an unrealistic timeline. Plus, this will give my schedule the air to finish my Batman project with my son at a really high level, without having to drop any of the other great smaller projects I have lined up for the back half of 2024. He’s grown so much as an artist since finishing his last page – I’m extremely excited to see what comes next!
ILLUSTRATION UPDATE
I’m officially behind being behind on the Character Design Challenges. However, I did find the time to knock out my character sketch for the April theme, “Traveling Shepherd”:
You can check out the character description for this sad, little ghost girl here.
This is more of an update on the Illustration/Art World at large, but since the last issue, pretty much everyone has lost all patience with Meta. This is because that company (which includes Facebook and Instagram) has decided that they have the right to train their proprietary AI on the artwork uploaded by users. Now, I definitely think that’s unethical, but I guess they technically have the right to do so on their platform, as long as they provide a way for artists to opt out of that feature. However, they’ve made it close to impossible for artists (especially in America) to opt out, so many have looked for an alternative. This includes me, but mostly because Instagram has stopped being in any way beneficial to me for at least a year.
This brings us to Cara, a new portfolio/social site for artists that is strongly anti-AI. I’ve set up an account there, and would really appreciate it if you are able to give me a follow: https://cara.app/ajillustrates
Time to get back on track! I’ll be using to June to finish a painting and making progress on my Gandalf sculpt, and to take a much needed staycation with my wife and kids. Can’t wait to spend more time with the work I care most about, and with the people that matter the most to me.
— Andrew
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Andrew Johnson Illustrates 