« Year Summary »
2023 was a real tough year for me between work, family, and health. This year I ended up focusing a lot on myself personally to get better mentally and medically. The hardship that I faced, and the healing I needed to do left little time for any creative work. There are a handful of things that I have to show for it though.
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FFXIV Alliance Raid Banner | Unused Detecdev Article Artwork
A rather simple banner, but the project behind it was a lot of time and effort. I collected a bunch of data for alliance raids within Final Fantasy XIV, made a bunch of charts, and started to create aggregate data too. It was going to be one of the Detecdev articles, but it never came to fruition. I still have the data and charts publicly available «here» if that sounds interesting to you.
Something less creative and more functional, but still has a creative flair to it. Part of the healing process over the year, I ended up creating a Maslow pyramid based off of some other ones I had seen. Each tier and box is color coded so you can write in it to put things in categories. Of course I had to make the pyramid in the isometric perspective! Only thing I would do differently now that I look at it again is to make the text bigger on the right description side.
This year I started getting into fantasy cartography as a fresh new thing. I don't have any full detailed maps or many other tangible works. However, I do have a cliffside study/practice that I did around March of this year. Hopefully I'll have more stuff like this in the future.
This was also my first real attempt at hand-drawn digital art. I ended up getting a simple drawing pad that interfaces with the computer for this purpose.
Half-finished Nintendo Switch
Steam Deck & Nintendo Switch Banner | Unused Detecdev Article Artwork
As things started to get better for me, I finally felt inspired again to continue on with my website project. Initially, I began to create a Nintendo Switch just to tinker around. After that though, I created the Deck/Switch banner to go along with a "Handheld Consoles" article for Detecdev. That ended up never getting written or published. Despite that being around the end-times of the original website, I'm still really happy with how that particular banner came out!