So far so good!

Galaxy Ursus
2017 Copyright Joseph A. Wraith

   I believe 2017 is going to be a very productive year. 

   A year where at first a lot will happen very fast and then things will slow a bit and mellow.

   As a professional artist and illustrator I have combined my passions into a way of life and a way to support myself doing what I love to do everyday.   I'm not saying it isn't full of challenges, because it is.   Change is a big challenge and we all have to submit to change because if we don't we will go the way of the dinosaur.   Those who stand in the way of change often find themselves in the middle of a drowning flood, you either have to sink, or swim by then.   For me I'd rather sip my Pina Colada from an inner-tube floating down that river of change than trying to swim through the speeding rip currents in the other direction.

As an artist I do my best not to get caught up in religion and politics, I feel it only defeats my creativity and bores the hell out of my inner child who does most of my creative thinking for me.  Even my regular 3d animator job gets in the way sometimes, but it's work so it's allowed to be obtrusive.  There is so much I want to do and so much I want to try creative-wise that I sometimes feel like I am accomplishing nothing, that is until I look back on what I did in the last year, then I get a bit of balance back. It's always good to look back on the year as a whole to see where you are going in the coming one. You can change course if you want and veer to the left and then veer to the right and then make a slight left at the sign post ahead... sorry I got a little off track... but I think you get where I'm going. 

  Changes and challenges are good, they keep us on our toes and keep our minds working fast and fluid-like.   So this year I am expecting and manifesting change. I am manifesting a change in my art, I am manifesting a change in my clients and I am manifesting a change in my income. I also accept the challenges that manifesting such things brings.  You have to see it in your mind's eye then you have to go for it wholeheartedly. 

I remember several years ago when I was hit with the fact that businesses using Graphic Artists were now looking for graphic artists who did webdesign, combining what I knew at the time to be two separate things. I was a web designer and a graphic artist. I did both web and print, but never for the same companies. They were two very different jobs, now they were being combined and the pay rates were not, I have to be honest I felt a little angst towards that whole movement. I wanted to keep that separation and condemned the companies who tried to mix up the jobs for their own financial benefit.  Didn't do an ounce of good. You can't stop change.  Then Web Designers became Multi-media Artists and then Motion Graphics became a thing instead of just an Animator, or a Video Editor. So changes happen all the time in my business, I have to be ready to roll with it and learn something new, or be threatened with extinction.  Currently I'm learning Real Flow for Cinema 4d for my work and for my business of animation. It's a difficult particle plug-in program, it's time consuming and kind of limited, unlike the actual Real Flow program, but I need to learn it to keep up with the flow of client needs and add it to my creative palette if you will. Just another tool in my brushes and pencil cup.  It's all part of the change process.   Don't be afraid of change is basically what I'm saying.   Even if it seems daunting at first and hard to follow.

   You never know good things could happen and probably will!

Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.

~ George Carlin

Peace,

JW