July Roadmap and A Mid-Year Direction Shift

June brought about a number of truly unsettling developments in the art world, and like many other artists, I didn't feel like posting much throughout the month. I spent much of that time reconsidering my relationship with the technology that I have taken for granted as being a natural part of my career all this time. After thinking about it for a month, I've decided that I am taking a break from digital art for a while, and going back to analog. 

Mostly, this is in response to Adobe's betrayal of the art community and their attempts to harvest our work to train their new AI art tools on it. But it's not just them, it's also Meta, Twitter, Google, Etsy, Microsoft and essentially everyone else we've ever used to make, promote or sell our work who are insisting that it's okay for them to take our work without our consent, and make AI replacements of us with it. If you'd like to listen to a deeper dive on this, I did a presentation for Muddycolors last week on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpiCdhkIQjo

All this research and disappointment in media companies has forced me to reconsider my own goals for my personal work. And this is going to result some changes to what you can expect on here each month. First, as mentioned above, I want to spend the rest of the year making hand-made, analog work. We continue the pursuit of excellence in art through skill-building in traditional media. And I hope you will join me for this. We're going to be roughing it for a while! A lot more watercolor for dinner, and a lot less Photoshop for dessert.

But what will this mean for the Patreon here?

TUTORIALS: Going forward, we are going to be focusing on TRADITIONAL MEDIA guides. We started this last month with our first one, on watercolor spot illustrations:

And you can expect a lot more on watercolor as I renew my focus on that medium. Hopefully though, we will also get back to DRAWING DRAGONS and pencil work as well. But for the next few months, I am going to be focusing on guides that will help newcomers who are interested in joining us for the return of LETSDRAWMONSTERS!

LIVESTREAMS: Starting in August, I plan to dive back into community events with LETSDRAWMONSTERS 2. (Tentatively named "Watercolor Warriors" but this is still a work in progress.) It will be like the original series, with its focus on skill-building, sharing work with the community, and silly prizes. But this one will focus our challenge exclusively on hand-made analog work and pushing our traditional media SKILLS.

There are some new things we are considering for season 2. First is possibly breaking each creature design into 2 separate streams; a Wednesday stream for drawings, and a follow-up Friday stream for adding color in paint.

But I want to hear from you on this one:

Would you like 2 streams to give a longer working time? Or our old 1-stream speed-challenge format?  

Let me know in the comments!

Monster-of-the-Month Club: This one has driven me crazy as it is where I have always shared my Photoshop brush sets. But I have to admit, with Adobe's betrayal of our community, my heart's just not in it anymore. But I have obligations to the supporters in this tier, and I do have 50 unreleased brushes that I owe you. So my plan is to release them as a big bundle later this summer. A sort of last hurrah before closing up Photoshop for awhile. I do plan to pick up Affinity and Krita, and Procreate when it hits the desktop, so ultimately I can transfer my brushes over to those programs and fine tune them in each. If and when I do, I will release ALL of them here.

Until then, I've got more PS brushes to share, and you can expect a lot of watercolor monsters hi-res art and process guides. I will also be continuing work on the Martian series, though I do want to stick to concept art there for a while. I will still be sharing updates on the game, and you can expect a lot of hi-res Creature Concept Art Sheets for it as well, including the new bounty hunters series we are diving into!

Classic Fantasy Art Series: For you all, it's the DUNGEON!

Sorry, DUNGEON MASTER SERIES! 

We will be pushing to finish the calendar and sketchbook for this series throughout the rest of the year. And since our new mantra is DEATH TO PHOTOSHOP, I'm painting the rest of these Classic Fantasy Illustrations in watercolor The next one is, "If You Are Reading This, It's Already Too Late..."

Mentorships remain the same. If you've signed up, let me know on Discord or here which times work best for you. I will be running them July 8th, 9th, & 12th at 9AM, 1PM, and 8PM EST. 

So that's it. I'm sad about the state of digital tools and media right now but I'm not giving up. In fact, I'm doubling down. I love painting and drawing, and I'm really excited to spend the rest of the year splashing around in watercolor with you, even if the robots do come for us in the end!