AMA: Do you have hobbies?

Q: Do you do other artistic things outside of drawing to relax like painting miniatures, or are all your hobbies completely non-art related? For that matter do you do anything outside of drawing or is it all comic work/Patreon work all the time?

A: I have quite a few hobbies, actually. Do I make enough time for them? No. Absolutely not.

It’s been a long road for me making sure I take enough time away from the work part of life to, you know, actually have a life. Its very easy for me (like many artists) to just work all the time, because there’s always more to do! Add to it, that I genuinely like drawing and it becomes even easier to do nothing but draw. I don’t find the art stressful. Deadlines are stressful. Taxes and paperwork is stressful. Money is stressful. But the art is just something I do, and most of the time I’m pretty good at it. Even if I’m very critical about the quality of my work.

Even though drawing itself is not stressful, it still takes an emotional, mental, and physical toll, same as any other task. So, it is important for my own well-being and for the quality/consistency of my work that I take time to do other things. Much like when exercising: you can’t do nothing but push-ups and expect to be well rounded.

So I have plenty of other activities to occupy my mind and hands.

Some of my hobbies are legitimately creative, though not drawing/painting related. For instance I do some costuming work. Mostly rennfaire outfits and garb.

Ironically, I don’t think I actually made anything I’m wearing in this specific photo which is one of the best ones I have, but you get the idea.

I of course do a lot of reading, watching tv/movies, and playing video games. Gotta consume stories if you hope to be able to tell stories!

I don’t play nearly as many video games as I used to…

…but it is some great downtime when I can squeeze it in. I used to be big on the FPS titles, but I’ve found myself drawn more to games with stories. Which unfortunately makes a lot of modern sandbox games kind of boring and tedious to me.

My favorites hobbies, however, are the more physically involved ones. I used to be a pretty avid rock climber, though it’s been years since I really did any of that. Truth be told heights make me nervous because I hate falling. But there’s an incredible thrill to ascending a wall, figuring out the puzzle of how to make it up and then having the finger strength and balance to pull it off.

These days though, my physical activities mostly center around competitive shooting. Not so physically taxing as rock climbing, but requires a great deal of focus and high speed visual processing and dexterity which I quite enjoy. I’m even kinda decent at it, having placed at the state level a few times.

Oh! And I roleplay! Which is something my parents got me into as a kid. Family D&D nights were awesome and while it’s much harder to get folks together to play on the regular than it used to be, I still really love the communal story telling and tension of needing that clutch nat 20.

This also means that I have all the usual roleplayer side-hobbies like collecting dice:

If you’ve a question you’d like me to answer, leave it in the comments below!