Making plans for 2025 is so boring...
Are you annoyed already by all the New Year's resolutions?
…but it’s important to me!
Hey everyone and thanks for clicking on 2024’s last letter from the Plastic Pen! 😊 Are you annoyed already by all the New Year’s posts all around social media? #ArtvsArtist, Resolutions, 2024 reviews…it’s probably the biggest fad around, because it’s bound to end by design. 😄
And I’m not going to re-invent that with today’s newsletter. Because I think reflecting and making plans for a new year is important and helpful. Setting up short-, mid- and long-term goals has helped me so much in organizing projects, and it kept me motivated when a big goal seemed too hard to reach.
One of my most ambitious personal projects from 2024, Suits of Life, is a good example for that: for years, I wanted to make another custom Poker cards deck. 54 cards, all hand illustrated. So much work! This year, I finally got to start working on it, by breaking it down to smaller goals:
Come up with a general idea for the cards and write down some ideas.
Just draw one card and see how the concept works.
Divide the suits into seasons, and make 13 Cards for one suit for now.
Eventually have a complete deck and publish it.
I’m confident that this principle works for any long term goal, including career goals. And certainly including one of the biggest personal goals I have and that I’ve been working on for many years now:
Building the Plastic Pen Brand
With the art world transforming, it becomes more and more important to me to invest the work into personal projects and my brand as a whole. I remember sharing thoughts about becoming more independent from client work and social media on Patreon a while ago, and I still hold this to be true.
There’s some things I’d really like to start or do more often:
Letters from the Plastic Pen: I don’t know how much you guys actually enjoy reading these. But I enjoy writing them a lot. 😄 I’m so proud about how my audience grew to over 2,500 readers this year though, and I want to try to grow it even bigger. Please feel free to let me know what you’d like to read more of in the future!
Regular YouTube uploads: To me, making videos is still between the extremes of loving and hating it. But I feel like there’s still so much potential, so I want to try a few things, maybe be more experimental with new videos. And I’d also like to try out Podcasting.
Real life events: I’ve never had a booth at an art convention or any similar events. I want to change that and get in touch with people irl, especially after I felt a bit detached from my online community recently (I may share some thoughts on that soon). So far, I have a table at Japan Impact in Lausanne (FEB 15-16) and Leipzig Art Days (SEP 20-21). I also made the event artwork for Japan Impact below! 😊
So much more, but…: The list goes on for a while. However, another 2025 goal is to not loose the focus on my goals - something that happened to me a lot in the past, when the list grew too big. For this reason, I decided to take a couple things off the list again, including making a big online video course. (sorry if you waited for that)
As for commissions and commercial projects, I’m happy with the opportunities I got in 2024. My only goal here is to keep this going just like that, while still leaving space for all those personal projects.
So, do I really achieve these goals in the end?
For this last bit, let’s look at what all this goal talk is actually worth. I definitely didn’t tick half the goals from the 2024 list I wrote 12 months ago (focus, remember? 😅). You simply can’t predict what will happen throughout the year though. I’ve been sick a couple times. I took one or two spontaneous trips. Had a short-term unsuspected client gig opportunity.
I feel like it’s most important to keep the big picture in mind, and above all: to keep creating new art! In the end, that’s the biggest goal that headlines them all. I can’t wait to see which ideas will make it from thought to artwork next year - and to share the process with you!
Have a great 2025 & Cheers
Stefan
Agreed - splitting a large goal into smaller, actionable goals works every time. I have this antique car sitting in the garage; getting it up and running was a monster task, overwhelming to think about at the beginning. Breaking the goal into smaller pieces took the panic out of it, ha!