In glorious color...

Getting into the Xmas spirit... with a few ducks.

Having a personal work of mine open to praise and criticism has been an interesting experience. Admittedly, the positive comments can be quite uplifting and inspiring, and are preferred to the negative ones.

What confuses me is how some folk tend to over-analyze media according to their personal views, refusing to acknowledge any merits of a given work. I never claimed to be a fabulous writer, but I hope that folk who are introduced to my webcomic can appreciate the effort and passion that went into creating it.

I look forward to producing more webcomics with other ideas, to see how they in turn will be received.

I've found a struggle recently between satisfying my creative whims, and paying the bills. As a freelancer, I'm asked to draw what folk request; don't get me wrong, just being able to draw for a living pleases me very much, so this isn't a complaint.

It's just that I often wish I had the financial freedom to work on my own projects. It's been said that following one's passion ultimately leads to success, but I've always hesitated to put aside paying work to focus on vanity projects. There's always the chance that my concepts properly developed/presented could become sources of income, which only adds to my confusion.

Time management is the obvious answer; working on personal projects during 'free' time will help me scratch my creative itches.

I consider myself truly blessed to find myself in such a quandry.

Confidence is a strange thing, elusive like quicksilver, yet extremely potent.

I've been drawing many years, since my teen-age years. Only recently have I started to feel good about what I was producing, noting less mistakes. Having Slam McCracken chosen by Zuda to compete this month was a huge boost; suddenly, my half-baked concepts don't seem so, well, half-baked, and I'm starting to convince myself that I'm a 'webcomic creator'.

I've always known that I wanted to pursue my own ideas, rather than bring someone else's to life. With renewed confidence (ah, that word again), perhaps next year will finally see more of my ideas published, either on the web, or by some print-on-demand service.

Definitely, to be continued....