This is the space for our members to discuss and share their creative projects, ranging from written works to drawings, photography, and even craft projects such as knitting and woodworking. Self promotion is welcome (websites where we can view and/or purchase your work). Please do continue to preface if content is NSFW and be sure to properly spoiler/link such content.

Week before last, I took Saturday off from work to (mainly) go to my friend’s birthday party, but also to check out some local art fairs in the town next door. Two of them were going on concurrently, and it turned out that there was actually a third that day in my town, barely half a mile from my place. A longstanding disgruntlement has been that my job—always working weekends—prevents me from connecting more effectively with the local artistic community, such as it is (I believe there are several loosely-aligned varieties), let alone having any real avenues to sell or even market my own work (as I’ve mentioned before, it’s less about the money than giving my “excess” artwork to good homes so that I don’t have to eventually trash it, though obviously the money would be nice). That weekend offered a chance to finally get a look at my local communities in action (in three separate guises, no less), not to mention experience a proper social life for the first time in months (no weekends off doesn’t help that, either, especially given how most of my friends are either professionals or white-collar workers).

I’m… not sure I’ve been missing much, at least on the artistic front. I don’t really do mass prints or crafts, and obviously there’s nothing wrong with that, but both of the town-next-door festivals were more of a tchotchke market than anything else (one slightly Halloween-themed, but I think it was supposed to be), and the art at the other that wasn’t obviously inspired by, say, manga or Adventure Time or whatever had a weird sameyness to it that’s hard to describe, though if you spend a lot of time on a perennially frustrating Instagram it might look familiar (that said, it was a zine showcase, and I figure that’s something I ought to at least start considering given the nature of my illustration work). Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m being too fastidious or conservative when it comes to this stuff and I should lighten up, but it increasingly feels like that’s all that’s out there, at least in a local context.

One thing that keeps me going in my own work is that it feels like I’m the only person I know in my general orbit who’s doing the kind of thing I’m doing (single illustrations of sometimes fantasy-tinged scenes, but more often semiurban realism with a touch of surrealism and/or satire). That feels good sometimes but it can often feel a little alienating, and I’ve been trying to find others who do this, or something like it (it seems that there are a lot of artists out there, but not a lot of finished artwork—it feels more frustrating than the writing equivalent given how even sketches can stand on their own). I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to check out the fine arts club (separate from these other groups) in the town next door, but I wound up taking a miss. It’s happening again tomorrow night and I’m going for sure this time because I just need to know.

How’s your work going?