New Year, New Activity on Old Projects

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I do make plans for how I want to do things differently at this time of year but that’s more because I’m no longer planning for Christmas than because I’m making some sort of annual transformation. I figure life is a process of constant change, some purposeful, some by forced necessity, most gradual.

So what am I concentrating on? Mostly returning my attention to projects in progress.

There’s organizing and reducing our possessions. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, the next time we move I’d like it be with just the things we need and want rather than with everything we hadn’t decided to get rid of yet. So that’s clothes, books, videos (surprisingly, we only own DVDs that we intend to watch again), art supplies and general stuff. We have a lot of general stuff.

There’s Oz Squad. I haven’t been doing all those monster illustrations JUST for the fun of it. I’ve been sharpening my Photoshop coloring skills. This time last year I’d have thought that a color Oz Squad was a bad idea. I’d have said that coloring took me too long and that my color skills were too poor to make the job look good anyway. Coloring all those monsters has given me the practice I’ve needed to be confident that I can do Oz Squad pages almost as quickly in color as in black and white. And I’ve spent enough time thinking about color that I can balance it on a page so that it looks good.

Jason Levine, formerly of Comicraft, has signed on as letterer for the project. He’s been patiently reminding me of his interest for the last … year. Got to admire that. Jason, got any websites you’d like to me link to?

There’s Finnegan’s Brink, the graphic novel that Nizzibet is writing, I’m illustrating and she’s coloring. We’re digging the pages out of boxes this weekend and getting back to work on those.

There’s walking. I haven’t done enough of that lately. It’s really more a mental health issue than a physical one. I like to walk. Walking both calms and energizes me. I get some of my best thinking done when I’m walking. If I don’t walk around my life mainly consists of sitting around in boxes – the apartment, the car, the office. Nizzibet’s gotten healthy enough again to walk with me so it’s an activity we can add to our date day.

There’s other stuff. Updating my various webpages. Looking for property to own. Seeing a dentist. One thing at a time.