Art - 2025 review
Looking back at my final art blog post in 2024 I want to laugh. Not at what I was wrapping up, but where I laid out the goals for my art practice of 2025.
I acknowledged that we were going to start 2025 with a game jam and that would be my art for January. But little did I know that that game jam would completely change the direction the year would take.
January
January was full focus on Love in the Time of Spellphage. There were characters, there were backgrounds, there were random other assets needed to just add a little more flare. I covered most of these in my DevLog posts last year.
But I’m now going to spoil one of my favourite pieces from the game which I haven’t shared publicly because it’s one of the end scenes. In VNs the end scenes (or CGs) are kind of like the reward for finishing a path of the game so people don’t share them too widely. But we’re just 2 months away from original release so I feel like I waited long enough to share it.
February
On January 31st we finished Spellphage, on February 1st I launched the illness that would define my year (just like Spellphage!).
I got very sick the night of February 1st. I thought it was very bad food poisoning, up all night in the bathroom. But then it didn’t go away. I was never sick overnight again but my guts didn’t get better. It’s now completely wild to me that between Feb 1 to Feb 9 I did one of my favourite style studies of the year (Kyle Ferrin). How did I pull that off?? Why wasn’t I resting more??
I think I just assumed I was going to get better in a few days and didn’t want to lose my art flow. I did end up seeing a doctor around the 7th because it’s what the internet recommends when you haven’t stopped shitting for more than 3 days. He gave me an very intense diet to follow (cold, non-solid foods for a week) which super ruined my mood but I kept doing art anyway. And the diet didn’t even make things better.
March
I did my first ‘Reference Study’ in March. A term I made up for taking 3 reference images you like and smashing them together to make something new. I did these plant spirit boat guys.
I also did my Hades style study in March. I really was on a roll, even when still being very sick and experimenting with different diets to try to find a way to fix my guts.
April
I gave myself a birthday gift in April of letting myself draw a bunch of Pawmis.
I also did my 2nd reference study where I tried to learn how to paint with digital oil paint brushes.
May
May was when illness finally caught up with me and I lost my art momentum. I was into month 4 of the same symptoms every day. So I mostly spent time on the couch trying to not exhaust myself (I had extreme electrolyte deficiency by this point and was drinking powdered Gatorade everyday). We watched a lot of One Piece in those months.
I posted only once, sharing some sketches and some extremely early Fatemender concept art.
June
June was the real kickoff of Fatemender development. We were actively teaching ourselves about game design while paper prototyping what we had so far. I started blogging more about game and studio development than art at this point. Letting myself explore some different art styles when I had enough energy to draw.
July
In July I moved from concept art to asset creation. Created the card backs for land tiles and Journey Cards for Fatemender as well as a full set of Fate Cards.
Feels a little wild to look back and see how much of a wash May and June were for art production. Kind of feels like the colonoscopy I had at the start of July fixed me so I could do art again as I was once more on a roll.
August
I didn’t post any art focused blog posts in August. I was mostly working on item cards and making an animated main character. I was also drawing Blinkus, a guide character we were workshopping for Fatemender.
September
Wow no art :O
Except there was still art going on while studio work was happening. I just wasn’t blogging about it as much. Behind the scenes I was working on our capsule art for Fatemender’s Steam page. I ended up doing 2 passes on this. One that took a week and one that took 3 weeks (Carried into October).
I also made the card packs and deck boxes but was too busy to share them.
October
Still no art?? :O
Actually I did a second set of Fate Cards in here but didn’t blog about it!
I was also very focused on working on Fatemender Steam capsule art still but I didn’t end up blogging about it until December.
November
With the Steam Capsule art wrapped up it was time to finally start to focus on Fatemender characters.
I’d definitely been putting this off for a few reasons:
- It would be hard.
- I didn’t know what style I wanted to do them in.
- Should we contract someone to do these for us to save time?
I had been sitting on my Warden sketch for a few months at this point. And we wanted to get screenshots and a trailer put together for the Steam page. I had been keeping an eye out for artists open to commissions on BlueSky but I hadn’t seen anyone who was available + within our budget + had a style I loved. If we had gotten one of the grants we had applied to we probably would have contracted some of the art out. But now I’ve started and see no reason to stop unless I get stuck.
But I was very happy with how the first character turned out! Now I just need to remember to enjoy the challenge of having to make each successive character piece just as good.
December
December art has been focused on Fatemender demo content. The big lift on that is continuing with Fate Card characters. We introduce 3 of them in the tutorial which isn’t a huge amount but working on each one has been intimidating because I want them all to be some of the best work I’ve done.
I still have a to-do list of assets for the demo, hoping to wrap up a lot of them over my 2 weeks off from day job at the end of December.
Conclusion
(This template was made by @starlingharley.bsky.social over on BlueSky.)
By April my meticulously planned art practice format for 2025 was completely thrown out the window but I’m not sad about it. Working on Fatemender has pushed me to keep trying new things, work in ways I wouldn’t have, and do way more design work than I ever would have. It’s also pushed me to become comfortable with a lot more people seeing my art.
I kind of miss doing backgrounds and character expressions like I spent January working on, but it’s also been nice to just make some nice, polished final assets. I'm really proud of what I was able to make this year and still struggle to believe it! Next year will still be full focus on Fatemender art for most of the year, splitting my attention between that are doing promo work for the game. I’m not going to make any practice guide for next year, nor think about what I’ll work on after Fatemender, gotta leave room for more life changing game jams.
While my January to July gut problems seem to have concluded, my chronic hip pain of the last 4 years got worse in July. One health problem to another. So just when I was ready to start leaving the house more my hip pain got so bad that going far from home meant being in pain for multiple days. And now in December I don’t even need to leave the house to find the pain, it’s just kind of always there. So it’s kind of like, if I’m home-bound still I might as well be using my home time to draw.