crunchin' numbers with art

[kradeelav]

The topic of analyzing which months and seasons tend to be the "making art" ones came up when friends and I were talking about who had seasonal depression and when (summer vs winter). I've always wanted to break down the raw numbers of how many pieces I've created to see if there's patterns, and well, here you go. :o 

Some of these numbers may be slightly inconsistent from the totals and my "great krad art dump" (a free folder of all the art I created from 2011-2020) since I deleted the rare NDA and extremely personal work from there, and also won't include random sub-folders that are about other stuff.

Predictions (made before analyzing) 

• Numbers before 2014 may be sketchy because I know i created slightly more (especially in physical sketchbooks), but wasn't always consistent about putting it in my system of folders that I do now.
• Relatedly, I ramped up the number of artworks considerably towards the end of collage (2014) to try to hit ~360 artworks every year; haven't always hit that goal but I've been fairly decent about deliberately maintaining a leaning close to it, iirc.
• Making IRON CROWN (2016-18) might give it weird spiky monthly inflation bumps given I was cranking out comic pages like no tomorrow and also patreon content. (I uh, do not recommend that since it made me burn out hardcore for a while after lol)
• Definitely expecting a dip from August 2019 - March 2020; had a little-d-depressive spell from ~IRL drama~ that absolutely cratered any inclination to art. Expecting a smaller dip recently for similar reasons from uhh, fall 2021, I think? That was before i nudged myself in something similar to art therapy. Maybe there's an existing pattern of a fall dip? :o which would be freaking sweet to know in anticipation, ironically.

Results....




Commentary: 

• 2011: tail end of being known as the FE bishie drawer on deviantart, lol. was in college and focused more on design projects there.
• 2012: got into repcomm as a fandom ... oh man i forgot how much painting i used to do; majority painting but starting to transition into cell shade. lotta original work with a smattering of fanart, and was on dA still.
• 2013: still in repcomm ... tail end of the painting > cell-shade transition I was going through. I thiiiiiink this is when I stared posting on tumblr and neglecting the dA account?
• 2014: started visibly ramping up # of drawings, "consistent style, what style" lol - shit load of experimenting, the most studies I've done in one year. a lot of "dead hand" concepts, vague comic idea I wanted to do but was cringy and I'm glad never happened xD  graduated in the first half of the year, and it's kind of neat you can see how the back half really ramps up.
• 2015: consistently decent. after a while of not drawing zihark, i drew a fuck of a lot of unposted zihark x oc ships here and was clearly on fire there lol. oh man some of these are really cute and that i totally forgot. :') lotta republic commando fanart this year.
• 2016: surprisingly consistent year, almost hit the 360 total!  Submitted the IC comic pitch in June to the publisher, so the first half of the year was a ton of concept art, and the second half is comic page heavy.
• 2017: mild ouch. January and August was inflated due to uploading EOY dayjob stuff + doing a shitload of IC draft pages for my editor ... June, wow, June/July were bad months, i think i vaguely remember being art blocked here and really intimidated about IC going live in a few months from then (o u sweet summer child...) 
• 2018: Wobbled a little bit in summer, but otherwise pretty consistent/great. I don't remember a lot IRL but i see a lot of comic work in here and i was excited about being in a really fucky favorite scene :D
• 2019: ?? this year was way better than i thought it would be in totals LOL, You definitely see the depression dip in the back end as predicted, but i just realized I was doing an art mentoring course with chira in the first half of the year that explained the abnormal increase in the front half.
• 2020: Pretty good, I think I was obsessively diving into a number of zines (the on hiatus alucard/integra sex one aka WHAT GREATER SIN, TALKS, BOOTS, LUCID in particular) to distract myself from the flaming train wreck that was global news + adapting to remote work this year lol. you start seeing more of zihark here after IC dominated for a few years.
• 2021: Ouch.  That was easily the worst year in recent memory output-wise, and the back half of the year was especially rough as predicted. If I had to guess this was when I was mega burnt out on IC "and" nsfw art "and" really lost in what I wanted to do -- tangible lack of endurance. I did a number of shorter zines (SAFETY OFF, a trashed version of FEALTY, and LIVE WIRES) plus the current website graphic, so of the projects that happened, they were fun, at least. I do vaguely remember getting sick af with social media this year.
• 2022: Not done yet but the Jan-April dip was an obvious response to the whole cataracts thing since I found out about it in January (really fucking hard to draw with it lol) and a bout of covid. June's shaping up to be a high month given how I'm rolling on FALKE, though, so there's a chance I may still hit the 360 number if I work at it, and thank god art headspace-wise I'm feeling loads better than I did last year.

Conclusions

• apparently drawing really fucky/nsfw longer projects predictably pulls me out of month-long art blocks xD;  (FALKE, WHAT GREATER SIN, fucky IC chapters... ) But depending on the length of project they may cause burnout, so something for me to watch after the end of FALKE for sure.
• January's the highest average month in general which might be post "new years ALL RIGHT GONNA DO ALL THE THINGS" goals syndrome lol.
• June and November have historically been Not Great Months which makes absolutely no sense to me lol, there's no easy answer like seasonal funks. what gives xD? Paradoxically to this year's January, this year's June i am so not worried about.
• the only real pattern I'm seeing is "higher" years I tend to yo-yo between good/bad months wheras crappy years tend to be consistently low output. Hm ... to observe for this year, for sure.

Comments

[flowersforgraves]

very interesting! Taking notes for my own future analysis of my creative output.
/has recently begun in-depth tracking of his fanwork and original fiction

(Also, I've got a couple of your recent posts pulled up meaning to comment, I'll get there eventually!)

[kradeelav]

Having a folder to mindlessly dump all kind of screenshots in was the best idea college!krad ever had, haha. Definitely heard of a few writers having a similar system, at least for wordcounts.

imo another important part is not overly stressing about hard numbers since i basically paid no attention to them until... now, lol, and still honestly don't care too much other than vaguely aiming for ~300+ as a steady target. Obviously folks gotta adjust to what their life circumstances give them as we sure live in uh, an interesting timeline lol.


(And no worries if the other comments don't happen, even just hearing that there were glad eyeballs on them is great. :D )

[flowersforgraves]

I just set up an Airtable base for myself this year, which I have tricked myself into updating by making a submission form :P having a tickybox to check has REALLY helped my brain for some reason...

[kradeelav]

oh that's genius with the airtable idea... definitely will keep that in the back pocket. thank you for sharing! :D

[neotula]

dang, seeing this made me tally up my posting on ao3 since i joined in 2014. i counted each chapter posted/fic as a number, also added in a few old deleted works to my tally. I wanted to see if there was a pattern too, lol. i definitely spotted months i could remember feeling bad that were low, but somehow, oct 2018 is still one of my higher outputs despite being a shit month.

I didn't see a huge pattern based off months/time of year, but I could definitely see/spot places where I had certain interests that kept me writing more. I'll get bouts of long lasting depression, my output was next to nothing then. My last job also definitely decreased what I made--I can see a huge drop off right when we hit our busy season and things got rough there.

I'm definitely curious to see how this year goes. I'd never thought of totaling finished things like this before. I've got ol' ao3 tracking my yearly wordcount, but it's interesting to see what months are really high.

last october, i did whumptober, and while i didn't finish it, i posted 24 times on ao3, a number i can barely believe. The past two years i've averaged about 11 things posted per month, so 24 is huge.

this was a cool thing to try and see!

[kradeelav]

Isn't it enlightening? :D neat to see which fandoms / works that really catch the brain with hooks, and ideally, it'll help us both in the future to avoid the worst pitfalls, or at least soften them somewhat.

Was delightful to hear your retrospective there, thank you!