Happy New Year's Eve, Newgrounds! 💖
First off, thank you so much for 590 followers on Newgrounds! You guys are awesome!
2022 has actually been quite the year for me. While there were definitely amazing things that happened this year (Especially within Newgrounds!), there has also been a few considerable snags that I experienced this year.
Now let's get on to the highlights (and some important lowlights, as they will explain an announcement) of 2022!
2022 Recap 💖
January:
I partook in my first Pixel Day in January! Originally, I was trying to make a game in HaxeFlixel for the occasion, but due to time constraints, said game became a little animation instead. And to my surprise, it got frontpaged while still under judgment! My musician and friend, @beenibroh, also got front paged for the music!
I also attended the Newgrounds Winter Festival, which was a lot of fun!
February:
The One-Year Anniversary of me joining Newgrounds! Honestly, seeing how my art had improved and keeps improving since then, I am convinced that it's quite possibly the best decision I ever made! Not just for my art, but for my life too!
March:
A group of friends of mine and I combined our talents together and created the 4th place Best of March 2022 submission, Love Me Newgrounds!!!, for the Newgrounds Festivals Server event, Project Blind Date.
Also the month I became legally allowed to drink alcohol in the US! (My 21st Birthday, which, fun fact, was also the 23rd Anniversary of Nene Interactive Suicide, which is why it's now official Chomaverse canon that Nene and Herra have the same birthday). I also went to Orlando, Florida for about a week at the beginning of the month.
April:
My art style began undergoing a serious evolution. I started drawing necks and the heads were beginning to become less chibi-like. Nothing much happened beyond that.
May:
I started experimenting with different brushes for lineart due to me feeling like the regular G-Pen in CSP wasn't really cutting it for me anymore.
June:
I Celebrated Pico Day with a little Chromaverse lore in the form of two different projects, the Above Gif for Newgrounds, and the FNF mod, Starvation Alley for the Pico Day Mod Jam in the Friday Night Modding Community Discord Server. Also went to Reno, Nevada at the end of the month (had a lot of fun there)!
July:
I got Covid...
August:
Evolved Style goes into a bit of an advanced stage. Also went to Colorado Springs, and Ouray, Colorado for a little week-long trip. Pretty neat trip overall. Later that month, I started stressing out over money and my mental health was beginning to take a big decline.
September:
Unfortunately, I fell into a deep depression. My anxiety and OCD symptoms were also through the roof. It was sadly a pretty awful month in terms of mental health and quite possibly the worst month not just in 2022, but in my life, as my mental health was at an all-time low. Depression is truly painful at its worst (loss of interest in hobbies, barely willing to get up in the morning, and even contemplating just... ending it...). I was just sick of everything.
October:
Was beginning to feel a little better, but my mental health levels were still pretty critical. Celebrated 500 fans on Newgrounds by launching an NSFW Patreon Page as well as a Public Discord Server (The former is currently temporarily unlaunched due to poor planning and me realizing I wasn't quite ready to handle one yet, but I am hoping to relaunch it with a rework and a better content plan in 2023). Also went to Dallas, Texas with my parents partially due to my aforementioned critical mental health (and my mom and I like it when we travel together). We had a fun time!
A little later that month, I got an official diagnosis of Depression and PTSD (I had symptoms of the latter since I was 16, but didn't really think much of it until I was around 19-20. I also witnessed some pretty bad social media drama that gave me symptoms in October of 2021). Fortunately, I began undergoing a 5-day-a-week treatment known as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.
I also partook in the Faces of Newgrounds 2022 Collab (I drew Moxxy, MayaLaCookie's OC)
And Toy Story 2 Redialed Premiered! (I made Scene 145 [the "No no Bullseye. Don't take it that way." part] back in September of 2021).
November:
My Mental Health was beginning to improve as the treatments progressed. While I still had some bad days, they were really reducing in frequency and I was beginning to feel productive again. My family also said they were seeing more upbeat changes in my demeanor.
December:
I attended Tony Robbins' Date with Destiny Dec 2022 seminar event with my parents. It was a big help with a lot of struggles and helped with my mental health quite a bit. I also made some overworld music as well as a little tree ornament for this year's Tankmas ADVENTure!
I also returned for the Sketch Collab 2022!
Also released a limited-edition poster and OST FLPs and MIDIs of FNF: Seaside Serenade in celebration of the 1 year anniversary (Poster retires tomorrow at 11:59 PST, but if you think I should give it another run on Etsy at a later date, let me know :) ).
I also got a new Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE for Christmas and fell in love with that thing! (The artwork below "December:" was actually made with the tablet and not my PC). I also got a few other gifts, such as some moving blankets (to make a little faux vocal booth around my setup), Sonic Frontiers on Steam, a new, soft robe, a visa gift card, and of course, Peppermint Bark!
Alright. Now that I explained what all went down for me... I now announce that:
I will be going on a semi-hiatus starting this January.
Now some of you may have seen this on my bio already, but due to all my aforementioned mental health trouble during the last quarter of the year, a desire to invest in myself a little more, and possibly burnout as well, I will be taking a sort of break from uploading art on Newgrounds, Twitter, and Instagram. I also feel like I have been so concerned with making money with my art that I began to stray away from my core personality a bit. I feel like I had become a bit of a sellout. So I just want to take a step back and make art for myself (and post them on later dates as part of a potential new content strategy since I seriously lack consistency). Plus, with my mental health being on the rocks, I should take some serious time to focus on healing and reconstructing my self-love (I have been having a lot of problems with loving myself).
Don't worry though. I will still be partaking in collabs and have FNF Health Icon commissions open during that time (hence why it's a semi-hiatus). I also might snoop around the BBS and continue to talk to others on Discord. I'm thinking I would make a return to content uploading in June 2023 at the earliest (I might have to fight the temptation to resume earlier since it's been proven to me time and time again that the feeling that you are ready can be very deceiving, and I just neglected myself for quite some time now). I also have an idea for a little tutorial that I would like to make on YouTube on how I make TikToks with Clip Studio Paint, so I might upload that and share it with you all probably in January or February.
TL;DR: my mental health went to shit in the second half of 2022, and I need a break to re-evaluate and heal, but will still be partaking in collabs and doing light-load commissions as well as occasional check-ins.
But I do have plans for starting my own portfolio/e-commerce hybrid website in 2023 and I want to get to writing a comic I have been wanting to write for a while. So there will be things I will do during the semi-hiatus. They just won't be uploaded until afterward.
Anyway, that about wraps everything up!
Remi-le-Oduen
Take care, and happy holidays!