Welcome to my 200th day in a row of drawing, posting, and sharing my artwork. I’ve been going through the previous 100 posts, and the first thing I noticed is that there is a lot more stand-out artwork to share in this post today, then there was back when I did my 100th post. Which at the time I thought was a pretty huge post itself! I think today’s will surpass that one by a mile (it did). So, with the introduction out of the way, here’s some of my favorites from the past 100 days.

Last time I did this, I saved a lot of the rambling and thank you’s for the very end. This time however, I’m going to kick off with it because I’m not sure if everyone will read all the way until the end. I’ve been doing this for 200 freakin’ days in a row now, and I’ve said this plenty of times throughout this entire project, but I still feel like I just started this project. I’m not tired of this at all, despite how much of my time I’m devoting to it. The days just keep on piling up, and I’m feeling more confident than ever that I can finish all 365 days.

The only reason I feel that confidence though, is because day after day I get such awesome support from my friends and family. I’m having trouble finding a starting point to thank everybody, but I’ll try. I mean, first off there’s the likes, shares, and comments for each blog post, no matter which social media outlets I use; Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, or Google+, I get all kinds of various web activity every single day from my family and friends. There’s not much else I feel I can do but say THANK YOU! I don’t get a lot of internet exposure yet, and besides a few wonderful strangers that have commented or shared my work recently, I know I wouldn’t have continued very far if I didn’t feel like my work was appreciated, and I absolutely feel it’s appreciated on a regular basis from all you wonderful people.

Something I love, and respect, is that when I have my off days (and I definitely do, often enough) I notice a drop in traffic, as well as the social media interactions. Now, I’m sure a lot of people get blind support from their friends and family no matter what they do, and of course there are times when I don’t post something great, and it does get shared or commented on, but the fact that my friends and family actually notice when I post something I’m proud of, is just fantastic. It’s something I appreciate and it’s always pushing me to keep people interested in my work by creating better and better pieces of artwork.

Now, as far as getting that internet exposure I mentioned, I’ve been ignoring something extremely vital to getting listed in Google search results, and I have no idea why I’ve neglected it. The titles for every single daily post have been terrible. 199 days in a row of, “Day 5, Day 50, Day 100”, what was I thinking? My posts have been completely unsearchable up until now. Okay, I may go back through all 199 posts and add proper titles, along with keeping the day number in there somewhere, but at least from here on out all my posts will have proper titles. Now, we’ll see if people can actually find my pages this way.

There are so many things that have happened in the past 100 days that I still want to talk about. For instance, I was interviewed by Crystal Moody! You can find the entire interview right HERE. I started this year of creative habits project because of this woman. She was the person that inspired me to challenge myself and become an artist, and If I didn’t start reading her blog, and communicating with her early on over Twitter, then who knows what I would be doing right now. Rather than dipping my toes in here and there creatively, like I’ve been doing for years, I’ve instead fully committed myself to doing the artist thing full-time, and I don’t remember ever feeling so proud of myself for everything I’ve done so far.

Am I making money doing the whole artist thing yet? Technically, nope. Not really. So there’s still a long ways to go before I’ll feel proper about calling myself a professional artist. Though something else pretty amazing happened during the past 100 days; I started accepting tips from anyone who wants to help support my creative habit, and right away I was up about $80. I mailed out some personal drawings (still have one big one left to send out!) as a thank you to those people. And so with that money I ordered some new art supplies, and over the past little while I’ve noticed a huge increase in the quality of my on-paper artwork. Good quality supplies definitely goes a long way in helping to create quality artwork. So a huge thank you goes out to those that helped me by tipping me some monies!

I also should mention that I started my Facebook fanpage during these past 100 days as well. I’m currently up to 154 page likes, and it’s where I post all of my daily posts right now. Considering that I get almost zero internet exposure from search engines, it’s doing quite well so far. I’m excited to think that it’s entirely possible that by changing my post titles to something that’s actually going to show up in Google search results, I could potentially have a lot more page likes in the next 100 days. Or it’ll stay the exact same! Who knows?

I’ve also started listing my artwork on a few different art websites. You can buy prints with or without frames from Artpal. Or go to RedBubble and get my artwork printed onto various items, like coffee mugs, t-shirts, or throw pillows! I guess now would be a good time to post a couple screen shots of the throw pillow case my cousin Brad purchased a couple of weeks ago. They turned out awesome! Even if my photography isn’t so awesome.

   

Let’s see, anything else I haven’t mentioned? I’m sure there are some things that I’m forgetting, but I’ve talked long enough. Let’s get to some artwork!

It’s funny, I’m going over all these old posts and not just simply checking out the artwork, but reading the posts as well. I mentioned that it might be a good idea to try re-creating this alien guy (Who I named, Ralph. Or maybe someone else named him. Can’t remember.) in Photoshop since at this time I just got my laptop working again. I had no idea that painting him up in Photoshop would go on for over a week.

Boy, did this guy turn out great. I don’t have a whole lot to say about him really, but I must of spent a good 15 hours or so working on this from start to finish. You can notice that a lot of the features from the original sketch were changed, and some new features were added by the time I was finished.

…and then the next day I started working on this one. Here’s another one that took me something like a week to make. It started out on paper, much like the Ralph drawing, and evolved into a Photoshop painting. One of my all-time favorites, ever.

Here’s one that I technically didn’t even finish. I was getting frustrated with a few different parts of the painting that just weren’t turning out the way I had imagined, so I dropped it. However, looking back on where I left off, it looks pretty dang good. I would be super proud of this I had painted this with actual paint on a canvas. I think I was too hard on myself at the time.

Here’s a painting that I’ll always connect with my mother. She’s an avid reader, and I believe it was her idea that this would feel right at home on the cover of a horror novel. This is definitely one of her favorite pieces of artwork that I’ve done. When I first posted it, I thought it was kind of just a throw-away piece because I was just testing out some brush settings in Photoshop. It’s always nice to be surprised like that when someone shows appreciation for something you thought would go virtually unnoticed.

I’ve been looking forward to going back and looking at this one. I think this is my all-time favorite piece of artwork that I’ve done. I love me some good sci-fi, and we don’t get nearly enough of it on television. Maybe it’s because we’re pretty over saturated with it in the movies right now. No matter what the reason is, we need some great sci-fi back on television. I would love to see Star Trek get a new series, and I hear it all the time that that fans would likely embrace it. I know I would! I can’t get enough of it, honestly.

I love how I was creating random pages from an imaginary sci-fi world, that may or may not even be from the same imaginary web comic. A few weeks ago I made the decision to try and stay focused on building a mythology around a single sci-fi universe. So that way when my year of creative habits is completed, I can start thinking about possibly building an actual web comic. I’m always reading about how doing themed artwork is a profitable idea, mainly because you can then find out which demographic you can target and sell to. I’m fascinated with outer space and all kinds of sci-fi/fantasy, so that’s something I’m going to continue exploring.

This chubby little hamster is from a book my niece, Amber, let me borrow for awhile. It was literally a book about how to draw cute anime styled characters. Thanks for letting me borrow it. It was another fantastic learning experience.

You know, there sure were a lot of high quality images from these past 100 days. I may have to start cutting some of them out or I’ll be here a lot longer than I should be. This guy started out as a creepy facehugger type creature, and ended up a little bit adorable, don’tcha think?

          

So much happened in such a short period of time! This is going to be a truly epic post today, because I still have a lot of artwork that I want to talk about. Let’s try to clump some of them together to speed things up a bit. Here we have six drawings that I did on paper. All of these were done before my new art supplies even showed up. And I think I like all of these pretty equally, actually. Should I maybe get back to doing some of those detailed abstract designs?

Finally! My new supplies arrived at this point. This was the first proper piece of artwork I did, and it really turned out awesome. I can’t stress enough that on the actual paper, rather than in this photograph, the drawing looks so much better. It has a lot of interesting texture where you can see the details of the entire process of drawing and coloring it. Pretty proud of this one.

Oh yeah! My android guy. I had this whole idea for a web comic based on two androids, and a little floating service bot, who explore the galaxy and provide assistance to various intelligent life. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get to doing that, but I love the idea of artificial intelligence exploring outer space, planets, and life.

We’re almost all caught up to the present now. This has to be one of the most colorful pieces of artwork I’ve ever done. Again, on the actual paper it looks a lot better, but this is still a pretty decent representation of what it looks like. I’m not entirely sure what it is, exactly, but there sure is a lot going on. Let’s see, we have some Earth-like nature going on with the sky, grass, sun, and the tree there. There’s either the night sky with stars and a crescent moon, or maybe it’s outer space. What’s with that border though? This drawing is pretty wacky, overall.

This will be the last one. I was going to post the crumbling buildings and space tentacles I did just the other day, but it’s not really going to help me to look back at that picture and reminisce simply because it was created so recently. So, instead, I’ll look at this one here. Frankly, I wasn’t even going to look back at this one as it’s not one of my personal favorites. It was a fun experience though, and looks pretty good on paper, but I don’t think I learned anything from drawing it. However, I’m posting it because my step-bro and I have talked about this particular drawing on a couple of different occasions. I’m not sure if it’s his favorite or anything, but I think it’s funny that it reminds him of a quest tracking compass from an open world video game, and I can totally see that! I certainly wasn’t thinking about that when I created it, but it definitely fits!

Okay, so that’s my look back at the past 100 days. If anyone reads this far, bravo to you! I now consider you a Robert’s Creative Habit super fan, and you maybe should have spent your time more wisely! Please, leave a comment and let me know what I should work on next, keeping in mind that I’ll need to find a way to make sure it fits within this science fiction universe I’m attempting to build. But really, besides chubby hamsters, just about anything goes. Here’s to another 100 days! And then another 65 after that!

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