(Don't feel compelled to read this, nothing bad's happening)

Hey folks. I find I have a tendency to follow my own goals more stringently if I make them public, so here they are. This year the plan is to post everything that I have to post in some week in mid-to-late August (after exams, if I do real bad) and in the last week of December (also after exams), and otherwise limit my activity on the site basically just to rating things. Over the past couple years it's become very apparent to me that social media/forums are a complete time vacuum for me. Today, even, immediately coming off of deleting Discord yesterday, I found myself checking the BBS and then all the time I could've and should've spent studying unifilar schematics inevitably vanished. Should get myself checked, if I'm honest.

Anyway, by openly limiting the period in which I'm allowed to look there I'll hopefully free up some space, especially since the site would snitch on me if I broke that rule. Also planning not to use Twitter at all and to limit myself to a maximum of 2 hours looking at Youtube per day, but my mentioning those things here is a psychological thing rather than an accountability thing since none of you would be able to tell.

If you like my art look forward to the summer I guess.

Hubris drove me to log on again. It was not the time. What I have done must be undone. Wouldn't it be really funny if I finally posted some art again on specifically the penultimate day of the year. I think it would be.

that for your single-use account mr. adaranslayer, and no mistake

Levelled up, decided it's as good a prompt as any to log off for a while. A while could mean many things but it's probably at least two weeks. When I return I will have written 20,000 words of fanfiction and been stabbed four times.

And other stuff too, I guess. Planning on colouring this in some way. My original idea was with watercolours but I will have to check if that won't mess with the ink. Pretty proud of it up to this point in any case

Tried out watercolours for the first time in years. Not the best thing I've ever made but I'm decently proud of myself. Haven't had as much time for drawing recently but I did lay out another painting that I'll hopefully do this weekend.

In Jean Paul-Sartre's play No Exit, he draws attention at one point to the fact that there are no mirrors in these characters' version of hell, and so, because I thought the pun was vaguely amusing, I did my best (to limited success) to avoid mirrors, along with other images of my face, until the end of January.

It occurred to me a couple of days ago that something funny would happen if I tried to then draw a self-portrait from memory/imagination, so here's that, followed by a selfie I took immediately after for comparison:

Bit shit wunnit. I'll see what I can do next year but I will be trying to prioritise uni. I will probably not be doing a very good job, but at least in theory that's why you shouldn't expect anything much. Things may happen, but that is always true. Happy new year.

(Warning: this post is quite a long thing to scroll past so consider that before clicking "read more" if you see this on your feed)

That's the plan anyway. This doesn't have anything to do with Newgrounds specifically, I just feel the need to be generally offline for a couple of reasons; chiefly that I have quite a few exams coming soon and in rather quick succession and need to focus, but also I generally have an unhealthy relationship with social media that needs tending to, so it would be best to step away even if there were no immediate issues at hand.

Also, and this is a very weird feeling to me, and probably weirder still to see put into words: I'm kinda burnt out on art right now, and I don't mean making it*, just looking at it. I haven't seen basically anything that has elicited anything more than a "Hey that's neat" from me in what feels like months, and hopefully, just like any kind of burnout, dropping the habit completely for a while will allow me to appreciate it more when I pick it up again.

For those of you (probably just the two) that come to my page wondering why I stopped posting haikus, hi, here's why, and rest assured I will endeavour to keep doing them and post them all whenever I log on again.

Now to close out (and fill out, really) this post here's some stuff I did during my last break that didn't get onto the portal because it doesn't feel complete enough (to me anyway) to post there, and some explanations because I can't stop typing:

This is the same character concept as these posts:

https://urichov.newgrounds.com/news/post/1145016

https://urichov.newgrounds.com/news/post/1147260

https://urichov.newgrounds.com/news/post/1147369

https://urichov.newgrounds.com/news/post/1147822

Somebody making a fangame for a webcomic about magical girls asked for character ideas and I suggested a fire-breathing snake familiar, then made all these concept drawings of the snake familiar (not featured in this post) and the character to which it is attached. (Entirely of my own volition, ere you accuse them of having asked me for free art.) A series of looks inspired a bit by Ichigo from Bleach (that's like the whole second outfit, probably because of her hair, which was designed first), a bit by John Lennon (the sunglasses, also probably because of her hair), and a lot by googling stuff from the first half of the 20th century, though I don't think that third outfit has ever really been in vogue. Fourth outfit here's my favourite, I think the "surely she wouldn't be a teen delinquent" kind of mental image I had really solidified in that one. I actually came up with and drew another girl for that game, whom I drew just as many times, but only the non-costume drawings ever got exported because I wanted to post them to Twitter, so what her powers are will remain a mystery to the general public for the time being. Because of the way they're formatted it's probably better to just post some link than try to get them to agree to being pngs in a Newgrounds news post so here you go:

https://twitter.com/Urichov/status/1381730938300809217?s=20

https://twitter.com/Urichov/status/1384229841327714314?s=20

Also magical girls, inspired by that same webcomic. I'd drawn all their transformations but those drawings got lost unfortunately. Feel like if (meaning when) I come around to re-doing the transformed drawings I'll also touch up on these designs, mainly one and three, who I think, in hindsight, both wandered into fashion disaster territory. Also there's a Spinal Tap reference in here, fun fact.

I sized down the ensemble image to post on Twitter (too wide) so here's them fully-sized:

Here's something from an art telephone. I think it looks a bit rushed but I only had three days and I'm not a fast artist so it essentially was:

Also I never posted these but you may recall I also did ones for Dustox and Beautifly earlier this year. I actually did these first but didn't think they were as good. Worth posting though I think:

You may notice a developing theme here, good on you if so, it's not a coincidence. Whenever I was expecting to publish these I was going to make a playlist or news post like this one titled "that time I spent nine months drawing magical girls" or something but I guess it'll be "that time I spent seven months drawing magical girls then had to start over, making a grand total of sixteen" now, so look forward to that if you got to the end of this.

So long, hoes.

*Also that though

I've gone around the sun 21 times now.

This year sucked!