New year, new direction

Happy New Year everybody!  I hope you had a wonderful Christmas/Yule/Kwanza/Chanukah/Festivus/whateverholidayyoucelebrate and a fun New Year's Eve!

The new year is a time to make changes in your life, resolutions to do things better than you had in years past.  A time to start fresh and try something new.  It is a perfect time for new beginnings, new directions, and new attitudes. 

I have made a resolution for this coming year, one that I hope will help me be more inspired, productive, creative, and profitable.

In recent years I have been focusing heavily on commissions and other projects not my own.  A lot of my personal paintings, pieces, projects, and ideas have been sitting around unfinished for -years- because of this.  I sit and look at these things and think how much I would love to finish them, or any of the other hundreds of ideas I have rattling around my brain.  Then I think of my commission queue and I shudder, knowing I owe it to my customers to finish their work before I even think about doing anything of my own.  It is killing my creativity, and so this year I have vowed to make some changes.

Starting today I am going to be focusing less on commissions and more on my own visions, my own projects, my own creations. I will be working steadily on the commission queue I currently have, but interspersed between commissions will be new art, better art, art that is more....me, and more of what people want to see from me.  I am going to be trying new things, venturing in new, subtle directions, dabbling my fingers in areas I haven't before, and finishing up the things I started years ago. 

And I will be severely cutting back on commissions.

I will still be open to accept commission requests, but I will not be taking on any new "character" commissions for this year.  Meaning that if you want me to do a piece of your specific character I won't accept it right now.  I will open for these again sometime in 2014.  Hopefully this will give me time to get caught up on my current commissions and give me some free time to do some of my own work this year.

With this time freed up I plan on working on some new ideas for products like stickers, bookmarks, keychains...anything I can think up!  I also have a How To Draw Werewolves, Beast Wolves, and Wolf People book I have been working on I would like to see finished, as well as several books of my artwork.  Big paintings are also in the works again, and boy am I excited for those!  I have always loved to work big, and I love doing epic paintings that leave the viewer breathless and amazed. 

This one has been in the works for years, and no that is not Smaug ;)

So that is my resolution for the coming year, to try to do things differently, to try to create differently.  I still have a pile of owed art to get through, but I am giving myself permission to get some things done for me as well.  Hopefully this plan will work for me.  We will see how this year goes.

I hope you all have a wonderful, blessed, happy, and safe New Year ^.^