Have a dande day!

I mean it! This is going to be rather sappy and this is your only other warning, but overall this project of Rydia Every Day has been so transformative for me as an artist.

In 2023 I made very little art and it was rather disheartening. I wondered if I could really call myself an artist at all and I remember being at work thinking about the cycles of things I was stuck in, cycles that are all relatively hard to break. At the very least I knew I could start with art and, unfortunately, I do not really have a chill bone in my body when I decide to make something. I want to go big because, to me, going home simply isn't an option when it comes to creative endeavors. Often my hubris is a huge bite in the ass and the defeat can be hard to shake off when I don't live up to my very high expectations for myself, but I promised myself that, in 2024, I would fully commit to a practice I deeply believe in: I made this for me, but you can see it too. At the same time, every year around this time of year I also have the visual of an arrow being pulled back tight before it's sure to be launched into a grand horizon. It's cheesy and cliche but it really got me thinking about where my arrow could go in 2024.

So I set rules for myself, some of which I realized needed to be appropriately bent here and there as the year unfurled before me. Rydia Every Day had the following rules:

She had to be fully colored even while not necessarily rendered

She had to be in a relatively different pose and outfit

I could only give myself 4 hours and a 1080x1080px canvas to work with (the final is an exception so that she can serve as a page spread in the artbook I'll have made for myself as a physical copy of my year in art. She is 1080x2160px)

I had to post it to hold myself accountable and because of that I had to shake off the feeling of "being cringe" and talk about my art more in person to people I know in the real world.

It all sounded so easy in concept and, most days, it was, but this year was particularly difficult in my personal life for numerous reasons. That's when I started to realize how important the promises we keep to ourselves are just as important as the promises we keep towards others. Learning more about discipline, time management, what my best looked like each day, and ultimately what artistic growth and commitment looked like was a doozy on top of just living a life and being a person who works, has friends, and has a spouse. I'd be lying if I said I didn't go through periods of really hating working on this, some days it was a slog but the positives weighed more than the frustration. Not once did it feel like homework or a chore, but on so many occasions I realized on a bad day "I get to go home and work on Rydia!" or "Well at least Rydia's already finished today" depending on what my day looked like. Slowly I recontextualized and reframed negative aspects of my day and it made me grow as not just a person but as an artist.

My growth as an artist saw me with a whopping 21 commission clients this year that I had never had before. All because people saw Rydia and liked her and what they saw in my presentation of her to hire me, trust me even, with their creative vision. There are no words for what that feels like because it's more than graciousness, more than pride, and more than satisfaction. Art is something I've always viewed as so much bigger, so much more ancient than I am; it's a calling. It's a passion. It is the thing I spend most of my time thinking about. To call my relationship with art a hobby would be doing it a disservice. So I can not thank any of my clients enough for hiring me, you have helped me feel like I "made it" as an artist this year. And all because of Rydia.

She is my favorite character out of any of the characters I've ever made to tell stories with or draw for so much more than her design, her lore, or my connection to the JJBA fandom. She is an embodiment of my endurance, growth, and self love.

So thank you all, especially if you've read this, for joining me over the last 366 days. Your kind words and company meant so much on the good days and even more on the bad. I love you dearly and hope you're here to see what I make next now that I've realized, in the most humble way possible, I can do anything I set my mind to.

This year I:

have spent, approximately, 1,400 hours working on art (that is almost 16% of my entire year)

favored pink, blue, and brown in my artwork most

learned to draw fat and skin folds, enhanced my understanding of the movement of the body, perspective, and flesh tones, & thought about the stories I told without words in my work

made my very first piece of physical "merchandise" (a Rydia keychain of which only 3 exist)