After 6 months and 350+ hours, I finally finished my art portfolio application for animation at Sheridan.

This is the hardest I've ever worked on a project. Many late nights, abused caffeine for the first time, and accidentally lost a few pounds.

From my art teacher

"If you need some last minute motivation, look at the drawings you made when you started studying with me in October -- you're one of the most driven, hard working, and improved students I've ever worked with"

Moved to NYC and spent a lot of time with new friends: board game nights, hosting dinners, writing clubs, and Sunday morning waffles.

Slept on cardboard for a few nights at my new apartment.

Skrillex dropped two new 10/10 albums. Saw him, Fred Again, and Four Tet perform a surprise show out of a school bus in Times Square, and a 5-hour marathon DJ set at Madison Square Garden.

Also got into reading graphic novel memoirs. Their visual nature is great for personal stories. Favourite from this month The Best We Could Do, exploring the author and her family's experience with the Vietnam war and immigrating to America.

Sheridan portfolios are due in February, and the workload is overwhelming. I need to create portfolio pieces for life drawing, hand anatomy, character design, storyboards, animation, interior and exterior layouts, and 5 personal pieces

For all of these areas I'm not quite where I need to be, so I'm working as hard as I can to improve quickly, but to be honest I'm feeling a bit stretched thin

Every day I'm drawing at the library from 10am to 8pm. Lord give me the strength to finish this project

Most of this month passed by in a blur of drawing, but there were also some fun moments with friends

Went to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and got to experience Jónsi's Obsidian -- a near pitch black room filled with 195 speakers and a faint volcanic smoke. The combination of the music, lack of vision, and smells made me feel, for the first time, a quasi-religious experience.

Also cafe sketched, watched movies, and lifted with friends

The fantasy characters below are ones I designed back in October, but this time I tried working with color for the first time. Really pleased with how good they look despite only being colored with flats, shadows, and highlights

Spent a lot of time drawing figures, and for the first time, hands -- they're tricky, but these videos by Sinix and Marco Bucci really helped me

Lived with family in Toronto for the holidays

Caught up with high school classmates I hadn't seen in years. It's nice to see how people ended up going on such different paths in life. The delinquent druggie has a music promotion business. The music producer / athlete joined the military. The Star Wars nerd with a big YouTube account has a gf and is in charge of his uni's CS club.

Went to a ski lodge with a bunch of friends. Tried "The End" hot sauce, and its six million scovilles (the world's hottest pepper, california reapers, are two million) had me feeling like I had looked death in the eyes for 5 minutes straight

I left my job as a data engineer to study art full-time! I made an animated music video to celebrate.

Having the creation of art being my purpose every day (as opposed to working, then drawing a bit in the evening) has been a change that I’m still getting used to.

Most of my days have been spent drawing on Waterloo and Laurier campus, and taking breaks to play on public pianos.

Spent a week hanging out with my family and great-grandma.

One day I woke up to 6000+ page views, 100+ comments, and a dozen DMs from kind strangers -- a blog post I wrote, Why I Left Tech to Pursue Art, ended up on Hacker News

I also wrote Spotify Wrapped 2022 except it's about me and there's a playlist for each month

Watched the League of Legend world finals with 50 people at the Waterloo esports club. Had such a good time yelling with the crowd. I'll never forget when Guma stole Baron in Game 5, and we all erupted in incoherent yelling.