Year in Review: 2020

[kerravonsen]

Apologies for not having answered comments in too long. Sorry! Will get to them soon.

I haven't done something like this before, but after watching Rafi & Klee's Year in Review where they "celebrate all the little victories" even in this "dumpster fire of a year", I thought that would be a good idea. Of course my little human brain isn't going to remember everything, no way, so I'm going to prod my memories with things like my blog posts (including my locked to-do list posts). Probably not going to try to trawl back through my twitter feed, though, that would take too long. Will be noting when I added various art pieces to my inventory, because I actually have a record of that, whereas I generally don't have a record of when I finished a piece.

Yeah it's a day late. Oh well.



January

• Bushfires so terrible that the air-quality in Melbourne goes down and some people are wearing masks. I don't notice. Because I'm being my normal hermit-self. (little did I know...)
• Do stuff with my family while they were still here after Christmas. (little did I know...)
• Art:
  • I upload my (awesome) "First 20 Elements" series to Redbubble.
  • I create my "Classical Elements" series (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)
  • Start my "Personifications" series (Personification of Joy)
  • Add 21 pieces (including the above) to my inventory.
• Start working on a knit/crochet shawl for my sister.
• Still enjoying the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and its fanfic)

February

• The struggle is real: battling my wonky sleep cycle begins.
• I invent the Chained Chain Join!
• I join the three pieces of my sister's shawl together with said join.
• Art: add 15 pieces to my inventory, including "Personification of Order".
  • Start my "Sunset" series.
• I watch the MCU "Age of Ultron" on DVD and have Thoughts.

March

• COVID-19
  • The global toilet-paper shortage takes me completely by surprise, but I manage okay because I have a stockpile of tissues for my fluid art. (Tissues may be flimsy, but they are easy to grab from a tissue box when both your (gloved) hands are covered with paint.)
  • My daily life doesn't change much because I was already working from home. Main change is that I'm having to go out more in order to buy groceries because they are no longer being delivered due to the delivery system being overwhelmed. (Grocery delivery did eventually return later in the year.)
  • I'm not losing income because I don't have any income to lose. Suddenly the fail-mode of "you are living off money you inherited from your Aunt while you fail to create a business" becomes the success-mode of "you are living off money you inherited from your Aunt, you are so much better off than a lot of people!".
  • I amply succeed in not panicking.
• Art: add 23 pieces to my inventory.
  • including a series on butterflies, prompted by the discovery of "popular Redbubble tags" data which indicated that butterflies were popular.
  • do a small series of cheerful uplifting pieces: "Girl Swinging On Moon", "Casting Stars" and "Be Like a Duck" as a morale-booster, which I do in response to a thread on twitter (and post them there).
  • also do "Personification of Chaos" and "Personification of Sadness" (not sure if that is ironic or supremely relevant)
• Successfully troubleshoot my Powerline Ethernet when it started misbehaving. (Hey, small wins are still wins)

April

• Continue to enjoy MCU fanfic.
• Art: add 12 pieces to my inventory.
  • including the COVID-19 related "Hermits United"
  • start the "Break Into Your Stash" series, prompted by a thread on twitter that points out that being in lockdown is the perfect time to actually break into your craft stash of things you had been "saving for a rainy day". The rainy day is here. Let us do craft!

May

• May 13th: My father dies. Not COVID-19, thank God. Just old age. He was 94.
  • My family discovers Zoom! In order to plan the funeral. (After the funeral, we continue to meet fortnightly on Zoom for the rest of the year.)
  • The COVID-19 restrictions have lifted sufficiently that we can have an actual funeral with 20 people actually physically there.
    • Funeral happens on May 28th, and is also livestreamed on YouTube.
    • I contribute a really nice video to the proceedings (combination of art pieces over a recording of a conversation that my sister-in-law had with my father ten days before he died).
      • I create a specific piece of art for this video: "Trinity 2"
• COVID-19: continue to be very glad I live in Australia.
• Still struggling with wonky sleep cycle.
• Art: add 7 pieces to my inventory.
  • continue working on the "Break Into Your Stash" series.
  • "Make Sourdough Not War" (because of the way that everyone is learning how to make sourdough bread due to Pandemic)

June

• Art: add 7 pieces to my inventory.
  • use new technique to make items look "ghostly" to make "Ghost Fish", "Curiosity" and "Ghost Ship".

July

• COVID-19: Melbourne second-wave lockdown begins (mainly due to the hotel quarantine fail)
  • I hardly notice. Because, as mentioned before, I live a hermit-like existence. Still, there is a difference in choosing not to go out, and not being able to go out.
• Take photos of the contents of Dad's house (before the lockdown escalates).
• Art: add 7 pieces to my inventory.
  • including "Piercing the Darkness", which is a concept I'd wanted to portray for a long time

August

• COVID-19: State of Disaster declared in Victoria. This includes nightly curfew, as well as other strong restrictions of movement.
  • Again, I hardly notice. Most of the time.
• Art: add 9 pieces to my inventory.
  • including t-shirt design: "Since I don't happen to have a Philosopher's Stone, I have to make do with Science." Which is a quote from one of my fanfic stories, which someone on AO3 made a comment that it would be good on a t-shirt, so I did.
  • also a lovely pouring session (#54) which netted a series of pieces "Sudden Thaw".
• See MCU "Infinity War" on DVD.

September

• COVID-19: restrictions start to ease, slowly
• Start on Instagram!
• Buy a drip filter coffee device, influenced by James Hoffmann, whose coffee-related YouTube channel I discovered earlier this year (but I can't remember when).
• Art: add 13 pieces to my inventory.
  • have some fun with my "Orbs" series.
  • Session #56: in honour of James Hoffmann's slo-mo espresso video, I do a fluid art session with every shade of brown that I have, plus some yellow, gold, and white.

October

• COVID-19: Victoria reaches zero new cases and zero deaths! Restrictions ease further.
• Yes, I am still struggling with my wonky sleep cycle.
• Art: I don't add any pieces to my inventory because I am working on a new system for my art inventory.
  • which is pretty cool. I love programming stuff for myself.
    • note that I have also, through the year, been refining scripts to assist me in (a) adding pieces to Redbubble, (b) adding pins to Tailwind, (c) generating images to go with the above
  • Session #59, which nets "Geode" and "Geode 2" -- didn't need to make digital art from these, they are lovely on their own.

November

• COVID-19: Victoria reaches zero active cases!
• Art: make up for October by adding 31 pieces to my inventory.
  • including three coffee-related pieces using art from Session #56.
  • mother-of-pearl/underwater technique, make series called "Pearl Dreaming". Very pretty.
  • figure out a way of doing a yellow-on-black pour without ending up with a lot of muddy-olive paint: do the pour on black synthetic paper, no black paint involved at all.
  • "Sea Mother" -- some lovely Art Nouveau clip-art, which I figure how to use by making the foreground white and the background being the fluid art.
  • "Storm on Venus" -- love this one.
  • new faux-glass technique results in "Glass Butterfly", "Glass Rose", "Glass Rose 2" and "Glass Turtle".
  • "Square Root of Two 2" -- another successful logarithmic spiral taking advantage of the properties of A4 paper and the square root of two.
  • "I Survived 2020 and all I got was this T-shirt. Whew!"
  • Varnish and frame a number of paintings intended to be given as Christmas presents.
• Actually write fanfic for the first time in years. (Missing scene for someone else's epic MCU fanfic. Yeah. Oh well.)
• Figure out a new way of adding clip-art pins to Tailwind as my previous method no longer works. This new method involves more programming, hey, that's cool.
• Also revamp my craft bookmarking program to store the data more portably.

December

• Pre-Christmas Christmas celebration on the Sunday before Christmas with family, because they were intending to go to Canberra.
  • Successfully make resin coasters the day before, for a present.
  • The Sydney outbreak makes family change their plans, so we have a second, more informal Christmas gathering on the evening of Christmas day as well.
    • Make cookies-and-cream icecream the day before (using this recipe) which we have as one of the desserts. It goes down well. Note that this recipe tastes better the next day because the cookies have time to soften.
• Art: add 10 pieces to my inventory.
  • Including "Away With the Fairies", "Fairy Fountain" and "Melted Rainbow", all of which take advantage of the Gimp/G'Mic "Dream Smoothing" filter which enables me to use paintings which are done with metallic paint; before I discovered that filter, there was little point in trying to make digitised art from pieces with metallic paint, because the sparkle makes them look like the whole painting is covered with sand. But the Dream Smoothing filter smooths out all that roughness, and makes fluid art look just as fluid-y as it would have if the whole thing had been made with non-metallic acrylics. So win!
  • "Semiprecious" -- I had been saving that fluid-art piece for a while because it reminded me so much of the mineral Sodalite and I wanted to make some sort of orb/gem/jewel/cabochon with that piece, but I didn't have a suitable background. But I finally did.

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