The Death Dealer and 2023

 This will be my year end reflection. My final project of 2023 is The Death Dealer from Frank Frazetta. I'm putting the story of why I like it and why I painted it the way I have in the description so you don't have to reread it here. It marks an end of a turbulent year in the world and I am glad it's leaving. 

So 2023 started off as a real chance to put the pandemic behind us and get on with our normal lives again. I had applied for plenty of jobs and got a handful of interviews. Nothing much to speak of but I was doing ok driving and trying to find myself again without the base anymore. Without knowing it I had become institutionalized where I came to depend on the place. It became engrained in me and a way of life.

Getting over that was hard. It took a lot of time to get over and to even understand what was happening. I was driving every day and making the ends but not gaining anywhere. I was ok with that though, I had a comfortable life. Drive in the morning, hobby until bed. Enjoy being free. 

I went to the Christmas party and my shop wasn't my shop anymore. The office where I spent the majority of my adult working life was gone. Just space now, the decal room is now the office. The shop looks horrible now overall it's meh, not the same feeling. The whole vibe was different, uninviting, colder. The whole building was different but it kept me from being overly nostalgic about the place. Talking to all my buddies again was great and confirmed I made the right decision. 

Then August came around. An event that changed my life and turns out was pretty good now. It was a very rocky start though, I told the stories of how I was going to walk anytime I felt it wasn't working. Well those days are over, I feel invested in my job now. I enjoy it on a few levels too. 

I've been doing things the way I know how to do, deconstruct it, look at it from a few different angles, put it back together and get rid of the spare parts. 

That's what I've done and I've found ways to get the students interested in learning this tech to make a living at things. I mean it is school right? We all get educated in some capacity to wind up in the supply chain at some point from a producer to a consumer, we all share this in the workforce. The more education, the theory goes, the better place you have in the supply chain. 

So why not get the students learning how to make something with their own imagination and profit from it? I mean it's kind of my class and I'm in charge of teaching what I think needs to be taught within the bounds of school policy. So that gave me a mission to figure out how to do it for this second semester and keep it within school policy. 

Goodbye 2023, hello 2024, let's do better huh?

You can check out my painting video of The Death Dealer here on my channel, RetJetPainter.