FEBRUARY 2018

Hello again, everyone and Happy Valentine's Day!

Can't believe we're already halfway into the second month of a new year. Hope everything is going well for you and yours!

It's been a busy time here with getting organized for 2018 and sticking to new goals.  Having completed the course for Web Development with Codecademy, I moved on to learning how to use After Effects. I definitely do not know everything there is to know about it just yet, but I feel pretty confident that I can continue to progress with my skills, especially having worked in animation back in the day of painting acetate cels. I probably shouldn't mention that, but eh. The actual work of animating things isn't too hard to understand, but the exporting seems pretty complicated with lots of choices and trying to keep the file sizes small while maintaining quality and compatibility with whatever file formats certain sites accept. If anyone has any advice they would be willing to share, please do!

Another resolution this year was to socialize a bit more and I had a great time at several events including The Society of Illustrators 60 Opening for Book and Editorial on February 2. I always have to push myself to go to these things because I'm certain I'll say or do something really goofy when I'm there, but once I'm there it's all good. I think. Anyway, it was really fun to catch up with a couple of former classmates from SVA who've really become breakout stars in the illustration world. They're nice people, too, so that's even better. It was also great to meet new people, and see all the fantastic work selected for the awards and show. I was a little disappointed when I realized after leaving that I had not said hi to a couple of folks who I wanted to get back to once they had finished their conversations with other people. Hopefully they will understand since it was super-duper crowded that evening.

Additionally, I've been creating self-directed projects like crazy, the issue is that I have so many ideas I tend to overwhelm myself and get frustrated because it does take  some time to complete the work. I'm not totally ready to share all the new stuff yet, but work completed for contest entries on Ello can be seen here, and new work specifically created for sale on Redbubble can be seen there as well.

Well, that's it for now. Happy Valentine's Day, stay well and we'll catch up together next month!
Michelle