And that was 2022

Hello friends I am writing this post after just dropping the final month of the years patron art into the mail. So let's take a look at some of the things we got to in 2022 and maybe expound a bit on some ideas for stuff to try out in 2023!

So first as the year started I sort of made mention to myself that I wanted to try and push the art I was making each month for the prints and really try and up my game a bit. I wanted to continue to make illustrations that were both creatively interesting for myself to make but also intriguing and fun for you all to receive. So I tried some new stuff. Set more "scene" like images as well as worked in more faux cover art style pieces for some months which allows me to stretch a bit of my design brain alongside the illustrations. I also wanted to continue to explore past characters of mine who we hadn't seen grace a monthly artcard in a while as well as continue to explore and create new characters. As seen in the examples here with the first card of a long standing character in Detective Dino, the return to monthly art for Heepo and the creation of an all new character in BlastBoy.

Also a few months into the year I sort of made the odd decision to see if I could indeed go a full year's worth of monthly art sticking to just portrait orientation and you know what, we did it! But onto the other monthly offering, stickers! I tried to get out there a little bit more this year with these as well and while not as exploratory I do think we had some really fun designs this year. Some of my personal favorites being the incredible Big Foot polaroid, the Fresno Kick flipper and the ultra old school JRPG styled Knight Light sticker!

So all in all I am very pleased with the monthly offerings this year. I think we hit high marks in both prints and stickers, but what else did we do? Well I had set a few goals for myself this year and those goals naturally intertwined with the patreon and how I moved forward with not only rounding out the offerings here (adding commission tokens and other shop discounts) and these additions and changes are helping inform the future but more on that later!

So firstly, Night Shift continued to roll on as a fun way for me to further explore designing merch. It's something I love doing and I thank you all for indulging me when I do haha. This year saw some new designs and collections. Such as the Occult collection to start the year, the Eyescream summer collection and then finally the Caverns & Cryptids collection to head into the holidays.

With these collections I was able to bring in more ideas about the brand and sort of what it is as well as try out wholly new items like hats, bottles and even pillows! These things are just fun and silly little bits for me to explore and some folks are into it and that is very cool to me, so again, thank you for that!

I also completely moved my website to a new host as well as redesigned it and updated things, and relauncehed the "Teeketch on the internet Occasional e-mail newsletter!"

you can see it all at teeketch.art / teeketch.art/newsletter

I plan to write up more newsletters in the new year as well as use the blog page on my site (hidden currently) to archive the ones I feel have a longer use case like tips, insights etc. Also there will be a blog! I am going to use this as more of a free space. A place where I can sort of jot thoughts down about different things like media I've enjoyed and why or talk about art as well as catalogue development on things I'm making, like my games!

Oh yeah, the games! So another 2022 highlight was getting my table top game Draw to an actual playable state. I made some simple pieces, wrote up the cards and got things all uploaded into a Roll20 room and ran a handful of playtests with some of you lovely folks as well as some friends and the game was actually fun! I kept tweaking it as feedback came in and even shared the design docs on how I created the pieces to the physical test print which you can see at teeketch.art/draw  . I continue to edit things but we are almost there I think and the goal for 2023 is to figure out a way to actually make this game a reality and something people can purchase should they desire! 

"But wait, you said games, as in plural." Why yes I did, so what else did I start knowing full well I was already too busy? Well I decided as a fun way to get creative, explore more of my own ideas as well as expand on something I am already passionate about that I would embark on creating my own TTRPG setting and system within the overarching world of my Knight Light concept. Which you can also read more about at teeketch.art/knightlight

So as I am pretty early on, making notes on rules and ideas for the system and how things work I am just ravenously consuming as many other systems and settings as I can that I think try and hone in on a similar vibe, mechanically to what I am trying to create. But making this is something I am extremely passionate about and a big proponent as to why I want to blog as a means to track progress and share the development with those interested. I want to bring people in and truly make the experience collaborative in a lot of ways. Much like the very initial concept of the OG Knight Light character design and concept process was. So you can expect some updates on this in the new year and for now enjoy this art exploration of a concept piece of promo art for the game (I also streamed this and have the footage so will be attempting to edit a nice process video together but I don't have a date on that yet.)

All in all 2022 was a wild year for a lot of reasons but a great year for me creatively and I think there is a lot of fun stuff to come in 2023! I hope to expand the patreon offerings with potential critique/draw over tiers for the folks who are here that also do art and maybe would be interested in something like that. As for general rewards there is talk about a potential sticker club but I have a lot of details to iron out for that haha. But again I thank you all for an incredible year of support, I could not do any of this without you. As always you can find me on the internet and in our Discord server which you can join here if you aren't already, everyone is welcome! 

So take care of yourselves and be good to each other <3

- Teeg