January is shaping up to be a better month, so far. Touch wood! I'm spending more time at the PC these days, getting myself organised to hopefully tackle making art once the Australian Summer cools down and I can start rendering without running the risk of frying my hardware. If all goes well, I should be in a position to start creating again in March or April, weather permitting. It's going to be wonderful to start making art again! I have missed it through this lengthy hiatus.

If all goes well, after I've blown the cobwebs off and I feel like I'm getting my mojo back, I'll reopen my commissions. I'm also considering running a special offer of a discounted rate for a month or two when I do start accepting commissions. How big the limited time discount will be all depends on how much I can afford.

So far, 2024 is off to a promising start! So watch this space for updates!

Happy New Year!

I'm still on a hiatus and while everything is still utterly crazy, I'm hoping that 2024 will be a better year for me on the art front. It's a New Year's Resolution: try and make more time for art. I don't know how successful I'll be, but it's worth a try. It has been so long since I made anything I'm having serious withdrawals!

The Year of the Dragon has once again rolled around and I find it inspiring to once again try and achieve my goal of making a series of images featuring dragons. There is a serious lack of dragons in my gallery and a Year of the Dragon is the perfect opportunity to correct that oversight. My previous attempt was thwarted by RL craziness, so I'm not optimistic this year will be any different when RL is the worst it has ever been.

If I'm able to carve out some time for art, I'll consider reopening my commission status. I certainly need the cash injection! This art thing is getting incredibly expensive these days with the US-AUD exchange rate down the toilet and while I'm not working on anything, it's getting harder to keep justifying the expense of subcriptions of my domain and core programs.

Any updates will be published here, so watch this space!

Obscuro Arcanum on Indefinite Hiatus

Things are utterly bonkers for me lately. A changing dynamic in the household is leaving me with absolutely no time for art these days. I’m lucky if I can get anywhere near my PC for an hour to check my email once a week, never mind something as labour intensive as my projects.

The cherry on the cake is my perpetual licenses for my Adobe programs, a cornerstone of my pipeline, have been flagged as illegitimate copies, which is a load of BS. There’s nothing for it but to either A) Swallow the expense of a CC subscription or B) try and find substitute programs that will be able to open my files from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. I don’t see the latter as a viable substitute. :(

If commissions were going better than they are – the annual downtime because of the wretched Australian summer wreaks merry hell on any hope I have at drumming up interest – then it would be easier. The price of commissions would help soften the expense of Adobe CC, as well as the other expenses I incur annually for this art thing. Art, which I utterly adore and is as important to me as breathing, is just getting harder and harder as the years go by. The last couple of years with everything have really put a stranglehold on my work, but the latest developments with the family and the problems with Adobe... it could almost be a death knell for my work.

Maybe things will be better in a couple of months, of some of the pressures breaking and I get some breathing room, but I don’t see it happening at this point in time. Equally frustrating is that if anything changes later in the year, it’s just that – late in the year and I will be staring down the barrel of another ugly Summer.

2023 is just an incredibly stressful year. I had hoped the Year of the Rabbit would be better, and while it is better in some regards - awesome, in fact with my new kittens! - I'm taking an absolute beating with everything else.