Welcome back my dear readers, it has been a long while!
Three months have passed since my previous blog post at the end of November 2022. I hope you're doing well with your work and life. If you are still checking my blog monthly, I hope this month's updates will satisfy your curiosity.
Firstly, as some of you may notice, online protests about AI generative art have made me hesitated to post artworks regularly on the internet because this suddenly felt so meaningless. Secondly, my blog is being hosted by ArtStation that offers a quite small fee for a nobody like me right now, 10 USD/month, instead of a large one year of payment like other web hosting services I've used. However, I was afraid that their business would collapse, and all my blogs would be gone for good when the AI protest was happening for more than 8 consecutive days (I stopped checking after that, it could be longer). Meanwhile, I was learning something new. Learning takes times, so I literally disappeared from the internet for a while.
Therefore, for the past months, I have decided to learn Anime Art from now on. It has been tough because I've really familiarized myself with digital Fine Art painting over the past two years. Thus, moving on to Anime Art feels strangely tricky now. Ironically, anime was the main reason why I decided to start this whole artistic career, yet it just feels awkward to come back to the root of my inspiration after all these years of learning Fine Art fundamentals. Don't be mistaken by how simple Anime Art looks. It may look easy at first but that doesn't make it any easier to learn than Fine Art at all.
I spent a lot of time on December 2022 to figure out where to learn Anime Art. It seems that Wingfox and Coloso are pretty ok with this niche subject. Personally, I like the learning curriculum of Coloso and have enrolled in a course in January 2023. Everything is so far so good but only time can tell. I think it may take me about 4 months to learn a 20-hour course at Coloso. As I'm new at this subject, it will take quite some time for everything to sink in though.
Other fun facts:
1) I'm reading more Japanese light novels.
If you're wondering "what language is this?", it's Vietnamese! I bought these from local bookstores in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
2) I watched 3 anime below in 3 cinemas in 3 days on a same week. What a nice coincidence! I got to watch them fast because they would vanish pretty quickly after one week in my city.
Link to where I found the anime posters above
Left - https://bokuaikimiai.jp/#modal
Right - Sword Art Online: Progressive Movie - Kuraki Yuuyami no Scherzo
3) I have got my hands on "Citrus", a gorgeous artbook from popman3580 who is one of my most favorite anime artist on Twitter over for the past few years. I even painted a quick fan art on a Sunday morning to celebrate this special moment too.
The "Citrus" artbook and my fanart of the girl on the book cover.
That's it for now, my dear readers! I hope I can still keep this habit of writing blog at the end of each month as it's still a great way to look back what I did each month though. Take care and have fun with your journey!