It’s that time of year again, time to look over the last twelve months of creative productivity! This was my busiest year for freelance animation EVER, with six projects all pretty much one after the other, some of which lasted several months! For the first time in over ten years animation actually felt like my main job! Read on for full details on each month!
January:
I kickstarted the year with an attempt to keep myself busy (haha) by coming up with weekly personal illustrations to work on while livestreaming. This included a couple based on childhood toys, followed by fan art of games I was playing at the time.
I also started my first freelance gig of the year about visiting a recycling center for Love Essex, which was finished and released in early Feb.
February:
I continued the weekly art streams (though I did skip one week while I was wrapping up the animation work) that included more Balan Wonderworld fan art and another nostalgia trip based around old TV game show Fun House which was seen and approved by Pat Sharp himself!
I also made some Valentine’s day silliness for CherryT and with her help also created this ridiculous Art Data-Blast video featuring all of my art over the years with a 90′s TV inspired intro.
March:
A big turning point for my livestreams arrived here when I decided to create a PNGTuber using Veadotube Mini! I livestreamed the majority of my experimentation and process and the cutdown videos about it became some of my biggest hits on YouTube yet! Going forward I would now use this animated avatar instead of a webcam, though this would actually end up being the last month of the year that I’d have any time to livestream because…
April:
..April would be the start of one of the biggest projects: six one-minute animated shorts for the Scottish Illegal Money Lending Unit about the dangers of loan sharks. This month was spent mostly storyboarding most of the films and completing the first one.
At the same time concepts were being developed for another six-minute piece of animation that I would need to juggle alongside the above project over the coming months!
I should also mention here life-wise I changed my daily job from working in a cinema to…working in a smaller, closer to home cinema!
May:
This month was mostly spent storyboarding for the second big project and waiting around for approval while the Loan Shark project was put on hold, so while I had a bit of spare time I gave my website a new lick of paint (including some new art of old characters) and made several illustrations including my favorite Eurovision 2022 act (now my most popular Tumblr post ever for some reason!), joining in on the Catoon Network CMYK art fad, and fan art of a fellow PNGTuber. I was also commissioned by Jadypie to create some cute animal Twitch emotes!
June:
After two pieces of quick art including another obscure game character and another excuse to draw Amy Rose, me and CherryT took a couple days away to visit the theme park Alton Towers, which I made a travel vlog about!
The 2nd film for the Stop Loan Sharks series was completed this month and this was when the 2nd big project was given the official go ahead! The six-and a half minute long film has yet to be released and might end up staying in the private sector but all I can say is it has a similar subject matter and art style to the Annabelle’s Journey film I made last year.
I also drew these guys for some reason.
July:
This month was almost exclusively knuckling down to get the un-released film fully animated. Much like the Annabelle film this was a massive amount of hand-drawn animation squeezed into just over one month! I also made time to do this commission for PCWzrd.
August:
With that long, time-consuming project out of the way it was time to jump back into the Loan Shark films. Two were completed in April and June but I still had four to go, so this month and most of September was day-to-day animating again!
September:
I was getting these Loan Shark films done at a rate of roughly 10 days per film, though the last one took a little longer as it was yet to be storyboarded until now. This project was finally complete midway through the month and released near the end!
Somewhere in the middle of all this I managed to fit in some livestreams of the Sonic Fan Games Expo and some reactions to some gaming events.
In the last week of the month I worked on a pretty exciting commission that I need to stay tight-lipped about for now!
October:
This month was started by wrapping up the above commission and jumping into another, thankfully much shorter 1 minute animation that has also not yet seen the light of day, but when it does I shall update this article! As soon as that was done another big project approached!
November:
This freelance gig started at the end of October and lasted all through November and up until the middle of December! Again I can’t really talk about this one until it’s out but this one I know when: the 9th of January, so stay tuned for that!
There was a break at the end of November when me and CherryT went to Birmingham for a few days to finally go to a concert we booked back in early 2020 that kept getting delayed!
Mid-month I also quickly doodled up my OC a couple times.
December:
This last project ended up taking longer than I anticipated at around seven or eight weeks total, most likely because it’s quite unlike anything I have done before (oooh intrigue!). After what felt like roughly nine months of almost non-stop animating the last half-month of the year was spent last-minute Christmas shopping and finally chilling out a bit, including going to a local video games expo for the weekend! The last piece of art I did this year was for the Newgrounds Secret Santa.
That was an intense year! I can’t wait till you get to see the stuff that’s not out there yet and in terms of 2023 I do already have a couple things queued up for January so we’ll see how it goes I guess!
