Happy New Year's Eve everyone! Here's my art summary for 2024!

This year has been quite a tumultuous one for me with a lot of highs and lows. I started the year off dealing at Furnal Equinox which despite some dealer table placement confusion went pretty well for me.

But right around July was when I started feeling extremely burnt out after back-to-back cons at Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, then Fur-Eh! in Edmonton about two weeks after AC and finally CanFurence in Ottawa around the beginning of August and that was compounded with other stressful events occuring such as when I nearly lost my entire luggage while flying from Toronto to Pittsburgh since that particular flight had an unusual amount of hockey players and as such a large amount of hockey gear was loaded on to that plane which unfortunately meant my own single luggage case which contained not just my art prints to sell, but also my displays, my toothbrush/toothpaste but even my own clothes and pajamas as well.

I can still remember that Thursday afternoon furiously sketching away on the blank paper I had in my backpack while waiting at the Pittsburgh airport for SEVEN hours for the next flight from Toronto to arrive which I assumed would also bring my luggage over as well and around 11:45pm I went from optimistic to feel absolutely devastated as my luggage still didn't arrive and I had no choice but to file a report for my missing luggage and had to move on to my hotel room that evening. I don't even know how I was able to sleep later that evening. I couldn't help but feel it might've gotten stolen along with it being lost in the chaos of Toronto's Pearson airport. It went from a promising day to a traumatic one but before I did I informed everyone on social media about my situation and asked them to at least check on my websites due to my missing portfolios, examples and price guides to show everyone and afterwards did my best to sleep in the clothes I had on without my pajamas.

The next day however would become one of the most memorable days for me this entire year. I don't know how I was even able to pull myself together for tabling at the Artist Alley at Anthrocon that weekend but I wanted to do my best to soldier on because I knew a lot of my artist friends and other acquaintances that I've gotten to known would be there as well and I didn't want to break down in front of any of them. But what I didn't realized though was that my post explaining my entire situation would garner a massive amount of attention from other artists there that shared it and because of that I managed to get a large amount of on-the-spot and take home commissions to work on which were helped by the sketches I drew during that wait at the airport to show as new examples along with kind donations from truly generous and sympathetic attendees and I can't express my full gratitude enough to everyone there who helped me out during a time when I needed it the most. It was truly one of those moments within this fandom that made me felt like I was actually part of a community and that same community let me knew I was a part of them because of their generosity.

Eventually my luggage arrived at last on Sunday of all days but I sold what little I could before heading home. Anthrocon I think would end up being an insane but great weekend for me in retrospect haha. Fur-Eh! followed after which went smoother than AC obviously and I did decent enough there. However I felt that due to rising costs and what I was actually earning back from it, I felt it might be time to say farewell to Alberta for the time being and if that was my last Fur-Eh there then it was a good one to have with everyone there.

Finally the time came for CanFurence and this was when I felt like I should've ended my summer con tour and just pulled out of it altogether, since it ended up being the absolute worst con I've dealt with the lowest amount of sales I had along with quite frankly certain rude staff that just made tabling there unbearable for me and I left for home as soon as I could feeling completely exhausted and burnt out.

In between cons I tried to finish the work that I owed but was just too worn out to be able to concentrate long enough to do so. And so I decided from August onwards I would give myself a break from the stress of cons and focus more on recovery for my mind and my spirit until I felt much better to be able to give my best effort for the work that I owed my clients and for my own ideas as well.

After a decent amount of time of rest I ended up making some of my best works of the year! In particular my pinup for October which I think was probably the single best picture I made this year and I was blown away about how much attention it got since it really was more or less like an artistic cry for help, like my reaction to not feeling a real connection to certain art around me so I felt like I had to create the type of art I wanted to see more than anything else which resulted in this and I'm very proud of it still.

The next year is actually a very uncertain one for me since I do not have any confirmed cons that I'll be dealing at and I even got waitlisted for my home con of Furnal Equinox too. But I will still be here working away on the art I still owe and to make new art that I hope everyone will enjoy as well! I hope you can all excuse me if I seemed to be slow in responding at times, It's been a really stressful year at home for me as well with it's own chaotic series of events (car crashes, family tragedies etc..) but I'm still comnitted to getting everything done. And if you've been reading for this long I'm sorry for the long rambling here but I appreciate you all for taking the time to do so and please look forward to what else I'll be able to come up with for you all next year!

Thank you, and hope you all have a happy new year!

-Shadow