Roadmap 2023

Welcome to 2023! 2022 continued the long, unending train wreck that started in 2020. At the start of last year I had a dozen big, amazing, starry-eyed plans in 2022 of which I finished maybe one. The first half of the year was spent catching up from the disasters of 2020 and 2021, and then the second half of the year was a floating dumpster fire of non-stop school sicknesses. (They called it a tripledemic, but it was more of a decademic for us...) So for 2023, I hesitate to promise any New Year's Resolutions (because why tempt fate?), but I’ll tell you my hopes and dreams 2023 and let's see where that goes!:  

The Return of the Monster of the Month!

My first hope and dream for 2023 is to finish a first draft of the illustrated story book for the Monster-of-the-Month. Publishing a story I have written and illustrated has been a long-term dream of mine, and its high time we tackled this goal in earnest! 

While most of the monsters will be along the classic lines of the "Were-Bear" (pictured above), there will also be a new series of titan monsters: "The Afflictions." More on those later...

What does this mean for this Patreon? This year I want to share the usual content with you: Hi-Res Drawings and Full-color illustrations of monsters, vignette character study drawings, concept art, Process Guides and more epic sprawling battle scenes. 

But ultimately, I’d love to add a new reward to our current line-up: a Story Tier where I share a fully-illustrated illustrated pdf of our first draft chapters as they are finished. I'm not sure when I will be able to launch this, but I am working hard on it at the start of this year. (fingers crossed!)

THE MARTIAN PROJECT

Fans of the Martian of the Month series: don’t despair. Later in the year we will return to mars and hopefully share some of the alpha build of the game. Until then, you can expect periodic hi-res color artwork from the game as we continue to make progress. There will also be several big character line-ups coming, like the following one of "the Raddish Troop":

TRADITIONAL ART FOCUS for 2023

As AI starts creeping its way into our lives and industry, I am doubling-down on my belief that traditional art will remain one of the best ways of insulating ourselves from the negative effects AI-generated artwork. AI will be a barnacle, a parasite, but it can never kill us. If you are serious about future-proofing yourself and your own work, join me this year in pushing our traditional skills and portfolios further! Many of my step-by-step guides this year will focus on traditional art, and many of our Twitch streams will continue to feature it. Even if you are a digital-only painter, I hope I can entice you to at least pick up some traditional materials this year and give it a shot as we dabble in Oil, Pencils, and Watercolors this year.

CLASSIC FANTASY ILLUSTRATIONS:

There will be a lot of new full-scale illustrated content here this year. Most of it pencil and digital, but also many oil paintings as well. We have one last image for the Faerie Queene to share with you, and once we wrap that up, there is a new illustrated book commission coming after that, featuring 17 dramatic landscapes of the American West, (with Dragons, Prehistoric mega-fauna, and fantasy battles!) More on that soon.  

My final dream for 2023 is that Annie and I will hopefully be able to start our long-awaited joint personal project and begin sharing work from that this year is well.

The Tutorials tier will remain largely the same, with VODs, Step-by-Step Guides, and other bonus content. I hesitate to promise anything, but I'd also like to start introducing exclusive content here in the form of time-lapse videos with some narration. 

Mentorships are ongoing but will remain limited for the first part of the year while we scramble to catch up, but I plan to keep this series going for as long as there is interest in it. Mentorships this month will be on January 9, 10, 12, & 13 at 9AM, 12 Noon, 8PM EST each day.  Message me on Discord or here if you have signed up and let me know which time slot you would like!  

So what happened to 2022? It all burned down and it’s still on fire. The three afflictions of Plague, AI-Generated Art and the Algorithm came for us and changed the world as we know it. But they couldn't stop us then and they aren't going to stop us now. I plan on making 2023 a better year and look forward to hanging out and drawing with you this year.

"A day may come when the courage of Men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the Age of Men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight!"

-jg