December 2025 | wrap-up
- Emily Randall
- Dec 31, 2025
- 7 min read
Happy New Year!!
That’s another year gone! Wow, time feels like it has flown by, but, at the same time, each month of 2025 feels like SUCH a long time ago. I have had several moments where I’ve gone ‘Wait - that was this year?!’.
Like I did last year, I’m using December’s blogpost as a chance to look back at the highlights of 2025, as well as to plan for the year ahead. This is inspired by the Art vs Artist posts us creatives make over on Instagram, mostly because I want to write way more than the character limit in photo descriptions allows. This year, though, it’s also a good way to remind myself of the good stuff that has happened between the bad.
Reviewing the year
Using the blogs I made each month in 2025, I can see what highlights each month held.
In January I made lots of art I am still proud of, and through it I found an art style I love to use (and still use!).
In February I had the confidence to outsource my first ever prints.
In March I made a silly animation inspired by the theme of Arthole’s Illustration Fair (of which I also sold at).
In April I made my own ‘Artist Starter Pack’ in response to the horrid Ai trend, but I’m putting this as a highlight more so for the fact that I drew a portrait of myself for it (I never draw myself) and liked it enough to use it as my profile picture across all my platforms.
May was a particularly difficult month out of the family dog’s year-long illness, but we kept going and she got a little better. I could only truly focus on finishing the outline for my novel this month.
In June I have two highlights as I did a lot of creative projects this month. The first is that I made one of my favourite digital pieces ever, ‘A Message from the Merrows’, depicting a scene from my novel. The second is that I created a zine that is also a sketchbook, teaching others how to document and draw trips outside - it’s appropriately called ‘Draw Outside!’.
In July I finally finished the first draft of my fantasy novel after 15 years of it being in my head, and got straight to planning and writing the next one!
In August I was busy making several new products for a couple of markets and a shop update, including my new handmade ‘Quilt’ sketchbook and a new addition to my ‘Place to Visit’ series for Chepstow Castle. I also helped start up and was a part of my first ever stamp rally! And I received my first pet portrait commission.
In September I tried something new - painting on wood. Collaborated with my Mum to paint decorations onto one of her wooden altars that she hand-made.
In October I got my sketchbooks and stickers in a shop!
In Novemeber I worked on getting myself out of a creative rut by drawing and painting in my sketchbooks a lot.
In December I concentrated on surviving and designed my own planner for 2026 to help me change my life around in the year to come.
I also like to look back at the goals I set myself last year and see how far I got with them. At the start of 2025 I wanted to: continue discovering what it is I truly want to draw; I wanted to draw more scenes and characters from my fantasy world; finish the first draft of my novel; work on a project I couldn’t reveal at the time; get some of my products out in to the world in physical shops; and make some fan animations.
Well...some of those things I did, some I didn’t! Which is to be expected!
-I feel I made a great step towards figuring out how I like to make art in January, when I focused on playing and ended up with a technique I really enjoyed (using watercolour to blob in colour then using coloured pencils for the linework). I’ve made a lot of art this year that I really enjoy. The next step, I think, is looking deeper and listening to what my soul wants to create. I like drawing pretty things like landscapes, sure, but I don’t feel like it’s doing very much in terms of expressing what I need to express and creating what might be helpful to others. I need to do some more soul searching, because at the moment I really am not sure what it is my soul wants…!
-I started the year off really well in terms of creating drawings and paintings relating to my fantasy novels. I made a piece every month for a good few months due to the themes of submissions I was a part of lining up well with themes in my story! However I did not end up filling up my Novel Sketchbook halfway, as I had hoped. In 2026 hopefully I will get past the block that thinks I need to make things perfect and neat in there!
-As I already mentioned in the monthly recap, I definitely did finish my Book 1 draft! In fact, I technically finished 2 books, as I soon realised that Book 1 was way too long and could be split into two. After that, I wrote about twenty chapters of Book 3, then had a break, then decided to start re-writing the first two books, as they need a lot of work now that I’m splitting them up (and it will help me to write Book 3 since things are inevitably going to change). This is the whole reason I’m writing multiple books instead of writing Book 1 and then looking into publishing it, since it’s all basically one long story that I have to cut up into books, so I want to make sure everything flows right! (I mean, the thought of publishing is also terrifying. I’m happy just keeping it as a hobby at the moment, until I’m ready to publish.)
-This ~project~ that I said I was going to work on…unfortunately fell through. It was a game design project, which I was doing with my brother, but the ‘project manager’ completely ghosted us after a few months of work, which was upsetting. However, from that, we decided that we need to work on own game projects, as we make the perfect team - my brother, the coder, and me, the artist. We are currently working on a game project, that, if anything, will be a portfolio-builder. But who knows - maybe it’ll become a real thing.
-To be honest, I had kind-of given up on the goal of getting my stuff in a shop after trying most of the year - then, in the last few months, things happened! Firstly Arthole, in Cardiff, took in some of my sketchbooks, then The Boat House Gallery, in Monmouth, took in more of my sketchbooks and sticker sheets. Both of them were sort-of chance encounters, too! I appreciate both parties taking my stuff in!
-And, lastly, making animations. Hmm. This one got away from me. I never got a round to animating the storyboards I have. I made one animation, and that was another self-imposed silly animation for one of Arthole’s illustration fairs. Other than that…no fan animations. Hopefully next year?
The year ahead
In 2026 I would like to:
-Continue figuring out what kind of art my soul wants to make.
-Edit my first and second novels.
-Finish my third novel?
-Make at least 1 video a month for YouTube. I want to take it more seriously and do more than just art vlogs.
-Give myself more publishing-related projects, like drawing the few short comic ideas I have, and challenging myself to redesign the PJO book covers.
-Make journalling and sketchbooking a habit, by making my very own custom 2026 diary/journal (am currently working on it - yes, I’ve left it very late…).
-Develop my game design skills/portfolio
-Make fanimations out of the storyboards I’ve been sitting on for years - some from Dan and Phil videos, some from QuinBoBin videos.
So, more goals than usual! A lot of them don’t have a specific finish line, so it’s not like I’m putting loads of pressure on myself. Like last year, I fully expect things to change throughout the year that might mean I don’t get some goals done or I come up with new ones.
I mostly just want to get serious with building some sort of career for myself, as I want to improve my current situation, so need to work hard to do so.
This will be the last blog post I have planned! I am not going to continue doing monthly wrap-up blog posts, but I might try to make myself write some more useful ones that might go hand-in-hand with some of my future YouTube videos. I have a few things planned, such as advice for how to get yourself out of an art rut, a watercolour review, how to travel-journal, how I made my own 2026 planner… I am very aware that I said this last year, though, and I did not make any blogposts like that…so we’ll see how that goes…
All in all I’m proud of the artwork I’ve made this year. Some are my favourite pieces I’ve ever made. I’m also super proud for finally finishing the first draft of one (technically two) of my books after ~15 years since the story’s conception. Writing and drawing are the two most important things to me, though writing will always be ahead of art. I want to change that, so that they are equal, as I want to include artwork in the published books, and I just want to be able to doodle my characters and scenes in general. To do that, I need to get over my perfectionism and procrastination, but also I need to practice more gesture drawing and enrinonment design. This is always a goal at the back of my mind, whatever year it is!
Anyway, Happy New Year, hope 2026 is better to anyone that needs it <3
~ Emily.
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