Wow, it's already February and I haven't done my "Stuff from 2011" blog post yet!  Whoops!  Time to correct that.

In my last yearly summary I mentioned that Sprinkles was my favourite character to have emerged during 2010.  Well 2011 came and went and Sprinkles is still hangin' around, cute as ever.  My favourite Sprinkles image so far is probably Hello Moon Friend (featured left), which was my first attempt at using a copic air can, so I'm kind of proud of it.  Sprinkles was also featured in the our first design that made it onto a t-shirt, which I think is kind of nice.  ^_^

Speaking of t-shirts, oh my gosh, so many designs!  We had so many ideas for t-shirt designs that we haven't had time to make them all.  It started in July when I decided that we needed to try to sell some t-shirt designs to earn some fast cash for a holiday in Canada.  We soon gave up on that plan, but stuck with the t-shirt design idea, and now we have a gorgeous twolofbees shop.  I'm so proud of all the effort Josh has put into making that happen.  I come up with a lot of ideas and sketches of designs, but Josh is the one who makes sure they're ready to go on the store (there's lots of digital vs printed colour stuff that I don't really understand, and can't be bothered learning about) - so thanks Josh!

Which leads me nicely to digital art.  I feel like a lot of my artwork these days begins life in traditional media, such as pens, pencils, markers, etc., and ends up being coloured or touched up digitally, which is a nice melding of old and new art techniques for me.  I've never been very comfortable drawing digitally (maybe if I had a sexy tablet with a screen in it I'd try harder), so it's really fantastic that I'm getting comfortable with manipulating my traditionally drawn pictures and enhancing them digitally.  Ctrl+z is my new best friend for experimenting with colours, layouts etc.  Winter Girl (featured left) is a nice example of one of my 2011 pieces that mixes traditional and digital art.

On another note, it seems that 2011 was the year of fan art.  With the releases of exciting games such as Portal 2, Puzzle Agent 2 and the Jurassic Park Telltale Game, Josh and I were both inspired to produce quite a lot of fan art last year.  I also managed to produce a few pieces that simply celebrate other games, characters, books, etc., that I love, such as Team Fortress 2, Cthulhu, Left 4 Dead and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Josh already did a few blog posts through the year about our fan art endeavors, so I won't go into any great detail now.  Suffice it to say that I had terriffic fun engaging in a creative way with some of my favourite popular culture.

And last but not least, after sucessfully completing honours in 2010 I promptly signed myself up for more stress and thesis monster mayhem by enrolling in a PhD in Gender Studies/Philosophy.  Yep, I'm writing another thesis, which means, of course, that I had to start a PhD Comic to help me survive the academic pressure.  This comic should be hanging around for 3-4 years (fingers crossed I'll finish within that time!!!) so be sure to check it out if you've been missing the Thesis Monster. ^_^

So I guess that's it from me for now.  Thanks everyone for sticking with us or joining us in 2011, and I look forward to hangin' out with y'all in 2012.  Time for some of my random favourites from 2011.  Cheers, mim.