Since I started seriously pursuing digital art, I vowed to make more art every year compared to the last. Since 2015 I'd managed to easily obtain that goal, effortlessly pumping out more and more each year. 2023 was the first time I didn't meet my goal, and I hit a major backslide. 2024 was shaping up to be more of the same, with an even smaller output. There are 147 files in my finished 2022 folder. There are 16 in my finished 2023 folder. As of October 31, my finished 2024 folder had 9.
What changed? A lot, but not my love of the craft. I still had so much passion for art. I just wasn't doing any of it. And it felt awful. My life actively felt more empty and lifeless. It was having a tangible effect on the way I felt about the world and my hobby and how I was trying to turn that hobby into a career. So in a fitful bout of frustration at what I had let myself become, at 2:10 AM on November 3rd, I decided to attempt the 30 day Huevember challenge.
There's a lot of 30 day art challenges out there. Huevember is much of the same, in the sense that its goal is to simply get you to create art for 30 days in a row. Every single day of November, you must simply make an art piece that only uses one hue. You can change the value or the saturation, but the color must remain the same. The colors are pre-picked for you. You just need to make something out of them. I didn't start the challenge on time, and I certainly didn't finish it on time, but I finished it. And through it, I rediscovered a love of the craft. None of these pieces are my best work. None of them have more than a few hours sunk into them. And yet, I love them. Through Huevember, I vowed to to experiment, to do things I hadn't done before, to practice my weaknesses, and above all: to actually create something. Although the art I made throughout November isn't the most polished, I made it. That's what matters. I think I'm falling in love with art all over again.
When asked what he hated most about the process, documentarian Kevin Perjurer responded "I hate literally every step in the filmmaking process. The only thing I hate more than making a film is not making a film."