Visions in the mist

Above: just a random forest scene, taken in Goldstream Provincial Park last summer during our camping trip!

Merry meet, friends!

A belated Happy Yule, Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to you all! However you chose to celebrate it, or even if you didn't celebrate the season at all, I hope you had a good one.

The whirlwind that is life has finally slowed down a little now that the holiday season is over, thankfully. I'm still fairly busy with work and side projects and all that, but at least there are no more presents to make and wrap and numerous social engagements and family events and stuff like that. Not that I really mind, but it can get busy in a short time frame during December!

For Christmas I was spoiled; lots of wonderful gifts from family and friends. My parents gave me an essential oil diffuser, which is exactly what I had wanted. It does a way better job than my primitive tealight-powered oil burner. I wanted this partially for health reasons (certain oils like eucalyptus are supposed to improve your respiration and relieve congestion) and partially because it's just fun and makes the house smell nice without the use of chemical perfumes (which can be bad for your lungs and the environment)!

Christmas itself was nice. Although I am a kind of neo-pagan sort, I still celebrate with my family because it's what we've always done, and I see no harm in it whatsoever. It's mostly a time for family and togetherness for me anyway; my family isn't really religious and we never bothered too much with that aspect of it.

On Christmas Eve, after I was off work, the Fox and I went over to his parents' house to spend the evening and the night there. His brothers are young (7 and 10 I think?) so it's fun to watch them get really excited about Christmas and Santa and all that. They both gave me gifts too, which was sweet! In the morning, we opened gifts and just generally hung out. The elder Foxes have a basement renter, who I met last year as well as they invite her up for Christmas. She's a nice lady, and a pagan too. So I got to connect with her a little about that. We didn't have too much of a chance to talk about that as the elder Foxes are technically Catholic. But I added her on Facebook. Always nice to connect with someone who's interested in similar things as you.

In the afternoon we headed over to my parents' for my family's Christmas dinner. That was nice; got to spend time with my uncle, whose wife died recently (which is very sad, but I'm glad he was able to come and spend the time with us instead of being all alone on Christmas). And all the usual suspects were there, except for my cousin's in-laws and their daughter... the family friend who I have mentioned before. He was in the hospital, unfortunately. I am not sure of what the situation is right now... I don't want to bother them with questions. But I'm not sure how he's doing.

Anyway, it was a nice holiday. I had four days off in a row, which was lovely! Managed to do nothing for a pretty good portion. Which is good. Sometimes I don't know how to relax and allow myself a break from everything!

I was back at it for New Year's, though. I had the 31st off, but since I had to work on New Year's Day I didn't do too much. Just went over to a friend's for a while to make homemade pizza and play a card game, very low-key. And today was inventory day at work... I've been up since before 4am... ugh!! Picked up two co-workers on my way this time, so I had to leave a little early. But we made it for 5am. The upside is that I was off at 1:30... but now I'm really exhausted!

I'm supposed to have Sundays and Mondays off now, but I'm working this Monday due to my boss's upcoming vacation. One day off for me only before my next 5-day work week... yargh! Oh well... I'll be Mon-Fri for the next couple weeks, so that's alright. Maybe I can actually do something on the weekend like everyone else does! Haha.

My pagan group had its Yule ritual, as I discussed last post. We'll be getting together again on Wednesday for our first meeting of the New Year. It'll be focused on "intentions"! I have some intentions for the upcoming year, so I'm pretty excited about that.

Speaking of intentions, I've been getting a clearer and clearer vision of my art lately, which is inspiring! I've been doing quite a bit of art, compared to the past couple years. I did a few pieces for Christmas gifts, and now I'm working on a personal piece (finally). I've been researching different kinds of ways to sell personal art... there are the traditional ways like galleries and prints, which is all good, but I came across a new idea -- YouTube.

I hung out with an old friend from university a few weeks ago, who I haven't seen in years. It was really good to see her again, as we have sort of similar interests in art and such, and we were kind of the odd ones out with all of our other graphic design-obsessed classmates. She is, or was, mainly a faerie artist -- one who paints faeries (it's a thing -- Brian Froud, or Amy Brown, or Anne Stokes, who is admittedly more general fantasy, for some of the more well-known examples). And you all know how much I love fantasy stuff. Anyway, we talked a lot about art and how/where to market it. She has some good ideas! She has her own YouTube channel, and she also told me to check out the YouTube channel of Baylee Jae, who is actually from our very own city. This artist supports herself mainly by making YouTube videos of her artistic process, as well as tutorials and product reviews and that sort of thing. It's surprisingly popular! Not that I mean to say that her art isn't good -- it is -- but it's also within the same ballpark as my own skill level, I think. Which means that if I were to make similar videos and market my art in the same way, maybe I could start making money off it that way. If you have enough subscribers and enough people watch your YouTube videos you start getting money from it (due to ads). Plus, if you build up a good audience in one place I think they'll be fairly likely to buy prints and such -- especially if they watched the art piece being made.

So! That's an idea I would like to try. I really never considered it before I saw Baylee's channel and how well it seemed to work for her. I like her videos; it's fun to see the process of art.

Also, I'm narrowing my focus a bit... I've been really just drawing dragons, haha. Most of these YouTube artists I've come across are of the pinup-girl variety (i.e. drawings of pretty girls with fantastical elements, or faeries, or mermaids, and the like). I think there is room for some new material in the form of fantastic beasts! I wouldn't mind becoming known as the Dragon Lady of the fantasy art scene. :) Faeries and mermaids are cool, but... dragons. Yes.

The Fox has offered to help me set up some sort of video-making contraption. I guess you just need a webcam (and some good lighting) to record your process, and you would also want to edit the footage afterwards to speed it up (it's much better to watch it in fast-motion, as doing art often takes hours and ideally your videos would not be longer than 10 minutes if you want to hold the attention of the viewer). Yes, I watched Baylee's video regarding "tips for a successful YouTube channel"... haha. It was informative, ok?

So that's kind of an exciting prospect. I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to making videos, but really, the only way to start doing something is to just do it, even if it's primitive at first!

I have heard that the main branch of our library here has recently got a lot of fancy new media equipment, like recording-studio type stuff... I'm going to look into that too and see if it's the right kind of stuff one would need to record an art video. If so, perhaps I can use their stuff.

It's nice to have a vision, even if you don't know how likely it is to come true. Just working towards something is sometimes enough to put that spring in your step and get you through the day at the office (or the day at the grocery store)!

At the very least, I want to start building up my body of work. Dragons everywhere! I'm going to just watercolour dragons until my eyes fall out. It's going to be great. Right now I'm working on one themed around the colour blue, like sapphires. I like the idea of doing a bunch of different dragons based on different gemstones.

So that's all good. I'm glad I'm finally over that art block thing I had going on. Remember how I was doing the Artist's Way for a while? I wonder if it was that which helped me spark my passion again, or if it has been the spiritual stuff (learning about the pagan way, gaining a new mindset on some things). Haha, I guess I never did finish the Artist's Way. To be honest, it was getting a bit annoying. I get the reasoning behind the daily journalling thing, but it just started to become a chore. And some of the activities were getting a bit silly. Anyway! I think I got what I needed out of it.

So, my goals for this new year?

Well, definitely to increase my art output. I have a vague idea of doing one piece per week. We'll see how that goes. I also want to spend less time on Facebook. It's always been a vice!! Time management is something I need to improve on. Less time on Facebook and more time doing productively relaxing things, like playing video games instead. (I'm serious -- I think playing video games is more productive than endlessly scrolling through Facebook! At least then I would be focusing my attention on one thing rather than jumping from this thing to that thing to the other thing, which is probably not the best for my attention span.) Maybe I should start bringing a book to read during my lunch break instead of using my phone to browse the dreaded Facebook. As well, I should really try to eat healthier. You know me and sugar. It's not good.

So those are some good goals, I think! I'm not going to make them any more specific than that, because I don't want to stress myself out too much. I want to relax too!

As for the future of this blog, I'd like to try doing some topic-specific posts, instead of just rambling incoherently about my life... that would not only help my writing skills, but it would probably be more interesting to read! Would you guys like that? (All three of my readers?) I'd probably pick some pagan topics to write about, as that's kind of what I'm learning about the most these days. And they say that to truly understand something, you must be able to explain it to someone else. I'll probably also write about the things I rant about a lot (careers and expectations and society and whatnot)!

Maybe I'll do another post at the end of January to see where this year has taken me, as I started this blog a year ago from the 26th.

Anyway! That's all for now, friends, and I bid you well until we meet again! (bows theatrically)