I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. As a matter of fact I’ve never made one. I can make resolutions at any time during the year and act on them so I’ve never had the need to do them at the beginning of a new year. But I do like to look ahead at the new year and try to figure out what art projects I want to get done in the next year.
There is nothing written in stone about these projects. Sometimes I get them done right away, sometimes they take years, and sometimes they never get done. But I do like to think about things.
Also there could be things I haven’t even thought of yet. Last summer I got five 24×36 inch paintings done. I hadn’t even thought about getting them done until a few months into the new year. So just because I don’t think of something now doesn’t mean it’s not going to get thought up later.
So here is what I’ve been thinking about getting done.
The first thing is the Great Gatsby Illustrated book that I’ve been working on for years. I think I’m just finishing up year four of working on it. I’ve almost got it done. I’ve already made many illustrations for it and after many months of getting nowhere on the book design I made some progress this past fall.
I might get it finished this year or I might not. When I first started working on it I made a promise to myself that it would be open ended. I wouldn’t give myself deadlines. I’m doing it because I want to. There is no pot of money at the end so I may as well enjoy the process.
As a tie in to the Illustrated book I’ve been mulling over the idea to make a Gatsby comic strip. I’d have to work up a series of turnaround drawings for all the characters and then use those to make the strip. That’s what I do with my “Four Talking Boxes” comic. It’s going to take a lot of work. I remember when doing the same thing for my comic strip characters it took me two weeks solid per character. Twelve, forty hour (at least) weeks. It will take me that long on Gatsby too. So maybe that can be my summer project.
Back in the late 1990s my friends and I self-published some comic books. They never made us money and most of them never got out into the world. As a consequence I still have a lot of them. I think I want to turn some of them into sketch covers. I’ll pull the staples on the books, put a new blank drawing paper cover on them, and then add the staples back in. That way I can make sketch covers out of my own comic.
I might also do some printed alternate covers that way. I made some prototypes a while ago printing out some of my “Dreams of Things” covers and then using the same staple pulling process to make a new cover for the book. I might do some more of that.
I’ve been watching a few TikTok videos by an artist giving advice on how to sell art. I’ve seen, heard, and read a lot of such advice over the years and none of it has ever worked for me. But still I like to keep my eyes open in case some of it ever does me any good. One piece of advice led me to think that I should put some stuff on my TikTok shop again. It’s been years since I had anything up but I might try again with some stuff.
I’m going to start with some small things. I might put up some of my tiny drawings. They are the ones that are only one by one and a half inches. They’re cute and people in real life have responded to them well. I’m just going to put stuff up and see if anyone responds to it.
I also might make some Gatsby prints to put up. It’s a popular book (in the public domain) so I think that people search for Gatsby things. I already have all the illustrations for the book I’ve been making but they might be too quirky for the general public. I might make some 1920’s style prints. That’s what people expect and I’d like to try to make some.
I’ve also stumbled upon the ACEO algorithm on TikTok and have been seeing people’s journeys selling those small, baseball card size, pieces of art. Mostly they do it on eBay and I might try there too but I also want to post them on Etsy. I already have a lot of them and I’ve been making them for years but I also just made some new ones. Abstract art ones.
I’ve never been a big abstract art painter. I love images a lot and therefore love working with images. I’ve made some abstract pieces over the years but not many. But I got it in my head to make some small ACEO ones. I like exploring abstract art ideas on a small scale rather than a big one.
I’ve made two types of ACEO abstract art cards so far. The first kind is of the abstract expressionist school. I use various acrylic pens and work in layers of paint on the small piece of paper. I usually have a few of them going at ones and switch between them. It’s all about making marks. I use a variety of techniques to put the paint on the paper and build it up into something interesting.
The other type is of the geometric abstraction school. First I draw a composition of rectangles on the paper. I start in pencil and then ink the edges of the rectangle with a thin black marker. After that I fill in all the rectangles with color. I’ve found the best color tools for this are my new Pantone markers. They’re water based inks and go down nice and smooth. Plus they are archival and the colors won’t fade like dye based markers will.
So far I’ve made about fifteen abstract ACEOs and I like the way they came out.
That’s all the stuff I’ve I thought about so far. There will probably be more but it’s only December 27 as I write this. Sometimes I’m thinking about this stuff all through January.