This year is pretty exhausting for me personally. Although I need to be thankful that in our 3rd year, we finally get to bring our products to a brick & mortar store, it’s required a lot of extra works we didn’t anticipate before. It consumed more of our time and energy, dealing with one obstacle to another. We learned quite a lot and gained a lot of knowledge on how the retail world actually works. Though we’re still baby crawl into the dark, at least we already put the first step into it.
As 2018 draws closer, I need to focus on preparing the next year collection. Last year, I was pretty sure and ready with my theme concept. I have a clear vision of the theme and the direction I want to take. We ended up releasing only 1 set of collection, breaking our own promise of releasing 2 sets of collections per year. I think the collection was well-received and I didn’t need to sacrifice myself to create such a mainstream design like the abstract-brush-strokes-watercolor design.
I kept making a lot of things since the middle of the year, but cannot decide what I really want to focus.
As a person who loves to be doing something rather than planning it first, I think I get the answer bit by bit, day by day. I think this is a perfect way for me to figure things out while I still don’t know what I’m drawn into. This time, I want to plunge more into color play. Rather than bickering in my head, what certain theme I want to make, I vectorized my stock drawings and putting more attention on making bold color scheme I have never tried before. If last year was more into soft and calm colors, I want to make more pop and out-of-the-world color scheme this time.
Although there is nothing special in the drawings and there are no extra works given on producing them, these are actually pretty special for me. This year, my family spent a lot of time in the hospital. Instead of suppressing my frustration of how this could happen, I tried to do what works for me to tackle depression–making something.
And by the way, I tend to over-buying unnecessary things when in stress, but these Posca pens are the best accident that could happen. I love the bold colors, the thickness, and the after effect.
So here are some of the early drafts that I’ve prepared. I’m still finding a way to make these colors work on each other, but I actually got pretty excited to find the final form of these all.
So, how’s your December going? I hope everything finally falls into place and this month becomes a nice closure to one hell of a year.
Have a nice month :)