2025 Wrapped

 

2025 was an interesting year. In a lot of ways, it was bad for a lot of people, with a lot of the pain being inflicted by billionaires, the government, fascists, AI, etc. To call it a good year would be to ignore all of those things. But in an attempt to bring some positivity in the world, I’d like to selfishly focus on some of the art-making I did and some of the lessons I’ve learned over the past year. 2025 was one of my most productive years as an art student and artist. My art suffered from a slump between 2020-2024 (can you guess why?), but I feel like a lot of my blockers are starting to clear up finally, and I can just have fun with making art again rather than putting excessive pressure on myself about my oeuvre.

I wrote a 2023 Wrapped blog post, and you’ll notice that it was entirely about software engineering. This post won’t be about software engineering, as I haven’t spent much time recently with software outside of playing with some game dev tools. That isn’t to say that I’m not interested in software engineering anymore, but I think the AI-era has given me a bit of the ick. It almost feels like guilt by association when the biggest names in tech right now are knobs like Sam fucking Altman. I know I’m not forced to use AI tools as a hobbyist, but they’re so prevalent that they’re hard to ignore. What I like about software engineering is that it’s a building process, and the sales pitch of AI tools is “I can build it for you!” as if the building wasn’t the fun part. I’ll keep pushing forward on game development, but I think I’ll probably keep away from other forms of software development for now. Going forward, I think I’ll try to have my “year wrapped” posts be more general rather than focused to avoid having to address big changes in topics.

I was a bit worried coming into 2025 because I was invited on a painting trip to France, and I was extremely rusty with oil paint. I hadn’t used oil paint since 2019, and I knew I’d be the worst in the class. I’d never painted alla prima before, and I knew everyone else going into the trip had lots of oil painting and alla prima experience from the class over at Chelsea Classical Studio. I wasn’t wrong, I was the worst in the class, BUT, I did learn a lot quickly because of the trip. Swallowing my pride and putting myself in a room with more experienced artists was a good way to get my motivation back and learn a lot. It’s not just the teachers I learned from, there was plenty to learn from the other students as well. There was one student that would paint all day with us and then when we were back, she’d work on a few more studies with these print-outs she brought with her. I’m still shooting for that level of discipline. I was going to write a blog post about the trip, but I never finished it, and so this is the best you’re going to get from me about it.

Once I completed the trip, I was really fired up and started going to Chelsea Classical Studio for their alla prima classes. They do hold the same pose from Tuesday to Thursday so I could in theory get two sessions (but that wouldn’t be alla prima, right?), but I typically just stuck to one. Partially to save money, but also to practice getting a workable piece faster. For reference, my previous oil painting experience was based around 4 Saturday sessions. We’d paint at the same location or with the same model every week for a month in about 3-hour sessions (not including breaks). I could make a mess out of things the first day and then paint over it all the next week until I could eventually get something passable at the end. With alla prima, I had to get something workable within one session of about 3 hours, which drastically reduces the amount of time I’m used to spending on a painting. With oil paint, it doesn’t dry while you’re painting, so it’s easy to end up with a mess if you’re not careful. A lot of what I had to learn was how to control the medium and not rely on the paint drying and then painting over it to fix mistakes. This means using techniques like scraping, where you scrape the paint off and just start over again. 

During the summer, I also took watercolor classes at the ASL with Mark Gonzalez. Mark is a great teacher, and was very good at explaining concepts and demonstrating them. I’ll probably take his class again soon, but I do feel like he gave me a good jumping off point, and I’ve practiced watercolor since and feel much more confident with the medium. It’s a great travel medium, and I’m planning on taking it with me to Madrid this year. Hopefully I’ll have something worth showing afterward.

2025 was a pretty good year for reading as well. I’d say the highlight of the year was reading, “I am a Cat” by Natsume Sōseki. I usually try to read Japanese works in Japanese, but I’ve tried to read Soseki before in Japanese, but it was too difficult for me. Having to repeatedly pause what I’m reading to look up words slows the reading process down significantly, which is demotivating. I can push through sometimes, but I find that now that I’ve gotten better at reading, it’s hard to feel like a beginner again with something difficult like Sōseki. Anyway, that’s just me making excuses for myself and my lack of ability as a Japanese reader. The actual book was excellent and worth reading in English. It’s a bit silly, with a lot of references to Meiji era people and politics, Chinese literature, and zen philosophy that went straight over my head. Despite that, it’s still enjoyable for anyone because it has strong and interesting characters. However, it’s a bit of a hard book to recommend without getting into spoilers. It starts fairly light, but the book gets quite a bit darker as it goes along. While I appreciate that, I think some may feel betrayed if I recommended it to them. Just avoid the Tuttle edition’s intro to avoid spoilers, that’s my only recommendation if you do read it.

While I read other books such as East of Eden, Feline Philosophy, 70% of the Hobbit (just finished that January 6th), the other book I re-read was an interesting choice for the end of the year. Death by Todd May. This one is a bit famous for having appeared on The Good Place and while I’m sure professional philosophers will scoff at the book for being pop philosophy, I think it poses some interesting questions and is worth the read for anybody willing to take a deeper look at their own mortality.

One of the biggest changes I made was near the end of the year, but I quit Instagram and Reddit. Instagram was annoying me for two reasons. The first is simply the insane amount of short form video content they were shoving down my throat. I’m getting pretty tired of short-form video and felt that it wasn’t worth keeping the account for that purpose. The second was because of their change of terms, saying they could train their AI models on your DMs. I realize they can just train their AI on my blog posts since they’re public, but I think the difference is that I had never intended my DMs to ever be used in that way, whereas if some bot or AI wants to crawl my site, whatever. I do miss seeing people's stories and updates from my friends, but the majority of my time was spent looking at short form videos, and so perhaps the bigger issue is my lack of self-control. I can no longer just open up the app and take a look during an idle moment.

Reddit was a big time-killer for me, but I was starting to get tired of “the voices”. They say “opinions are like assholes” and I just don’t need to hear random opinions on every topic. There’s quite a bit of false consensus you see a lot of, too, like when you go to almost any fandom subreddit and find the main people who post there just simply don’t like the thing because of some random consensus opinion. They stick around and spend every day complaining about said thing, which is weird to me, why bother? I found that a lot of fandom subreddits skewed negative because of this weird bias and overanalysis that I see a lot. It’s just not that deep, these fandom subreddits are usually about a video game, a show, a console, etc. and all of that is just entertainment. Plus, these days  it’s hard not to feel like ever since the big AI boom that half of these comments aren’t even real. I understand people were using bots to comment way before AI, but now almost every post or comment has big AI energy. I used it to keep up with nerd news, but I just don’t care about being up-to-date, and going forward I’ll go direct. Quitting both really freed up a lot of space in my brain. I did fill all a lot of that space with Balatro, Skyrim, and Oblivion Remastered, but I’m choosing to experience those games rather than having an algorithm decide what it wants to give me. I’m not trying to be elitist about it, people can spend their time however they want, but I was losing interest in what random content was going to show up on my phone. I wrote an article a while back about ways to use your phone for fun or as a tool, and I’m finding that returning to some of my own suggestions has been a great way to make better use out of my phone.

Another thing I realized this year is that I need to get back into writing, something I put on the back burner many years ago. Writing is an important process for idea generation, distilling thoughts, and creating stories. I had been thinking a lot about this before December, but James Gurney recently posted a blog post about Howard Pyle’s approach to teaching art, and it happened to line up perfectly with my thoughts on this. I was inspired to think about this from a Draftsman podcast episode (I forget which one!) where Marshall Vandruff talked about regretting not getting into screenwriting much earlier. It’s not that I didn’t think about the story when drawing and painting, but really focusing on it is the big revelation here. I have had a few ideas brewing for games, comics, and animation for a while I have a few sketches and concept drawings here and there, but I realized the thing holding me back is the writing part of it. Focusing on just the visuals without any writing wasn’t getting me anywhere. Maybe that’s not how everyone does it, but I’m already finding that integrating writing into my drawing practice for story-based art is pushing my art in new directions.

Overall, I’m excited about where 2026 is headed from a personal artistic standpoint and just that. I’m not excited about the state of the world and whatnot, but perhaps that’s a blog post for another time. Until next time!