The Best Wishes for the New Year!

     Hello and welcome back, friends.  If you are reading this then you have survived the Holidays. Well done to you!  I have also survived, so I think we could all use a collective pat on the back, or a deep tissue massage, perhaps.  

     It is New Year's Eve and we all reflect on the year that has passed and begin to start thinking and planning for the year ahead.  We can't help it. It is programmed into us to do so, like DNA. It has been a pretty good year for me.  I accomplished a lot, started new gigs, created a lot of art, and worked on personal things.  All in all my 2023 reflection has me pretty pleased and it just excites me more for what is to come in the year ahead.  

     I did reach a lot of my art goals I set for myself in 2022.  I did finish many unfinished pieces and am pleased with the outcome.  I look forward to continuing that goal next year but putting it more on the back burner.  Artistically this next year I would like to focus on 3 things mainly:   1.) Finishing the research and writing my next book (maybe even begin creating the art for it, but I am not going to push my luck. I'd be chuffed with the former alone, tbh.)    2.) Finish brushing up on the old portfolio. ( I had plans for some new pieces but they have remained in planning/unfinished phases off and on over the past couple of years.    3.) I would like to have my new website redesigned and live by the end of the year...  

     ...and of course, many other illustrations of whatever I think up (or have already thought up and written down in my Idea Journal) along the way.

     Speaking of working on and finishing unfinished works, THis illustration kinda sort of relates to that.  I had illustrated a New Year's Baby from behind many years ago.  I had updated it and caricatured a person I don't care much for with that updated illustration.  I had made them a promise to do it for them and I kept that promise. However, I have always regretted that choice.  So, I thought this year I would revisit that New Year's Baby again and reinvent them.  

     I think this may have started a new tradition for New Year's, artistically, for me.  I think I will illustrate a new New Year's Baby every year from now on.  Sometimes, they might be a boy, sometimes a girl, sometimes gender neutral, sometimes an animal.  Tying the illustration concept into Chinese New Year and the New Year celebrations of other cultures would also be cool to explore and give me plenty of ideas each year to create an illustration with.  

     Here is the 2024 New Year's Baby. He's cute, right?!  I think he is, if I may say so, but perhaps I am biased. It is my work. lol   

     There really isn't too much to share.  The hand gesture you may recognize from the Hierophant tarot card. In the tarot, the hand gesture symbolizes a direct connection between Heaven and Hell. The "pope" is a conduit.  I like to think that my illustration of the New Year's Baby, it represents the conduit between the past and the future.  This is obviously emphasized by the fact that he is sitting on an enlarged pocket watch.  We cannot see what time it is on the clock and that was a deliberate choice.  I wanted to express the limbo of what New Year's kinda is.  It's the precipice, the threshold of our future. Time really is of an ethereal nature on this holiday. the clock ticks forward but isn't quite the next year yet. Our minds are so preoccupied with reflecting on the past that we aren't quite living in the present either. So limbo. 

     His eyes are purple.  I wanted to evoke that this really wasn't any ordinary baby or even a human baby at all.  The NYE baby is an entity of some sort. A creature.  We don't really know what it is and I wanted to allude to that with this unnatural eye color. He's so cute you want to just scoop him up and hold him, but there's just something about those eyes that says "Try it and find out."

     I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year holiday.  Share with me some of your New Year's goals in the comments.  I'd love to hear about them. Happy New Year!

Until next time, friends,

Keep sketching, keep thinking, keep laughing, and most important of all, 
keep making art.
Cheers,
LEWIS