What's Coming Up in Year 2023

Emmy Pflugh

Jan 9

Happy New Year, everybody!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas from the past year of 2022, and now we are finally living in the new year of 2023 (I know it's been a week now, but thought I wish you all a Happy New Year)! Today's new and the very first topic to be published in year 2023, I thought I would start off to share my experiences and memories I've gone through year 2022, and then share on future art projects coming up this year.

Let's dive down back to 2022: I would describe my experiences and memories for living in the year of 2022 was a big life-changing experience, because I was finally starting to being discovered more than just being an early discover on my blog, and people looking at my animation artwork, fan art, pencil tests, and autism and disability advocacy.

The first thing was joining a virtual sensory-friendly program on animation and art for the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan on Wednesday evening on January 19th on via Zoom. It all begins with having to get an email from Caroline Braden, who works as an Accessibility Specialist at the Henry Ford Museum back in November 2021, two months before the presentation, and asked me if I can join the program and be one of the autistic speakers on Zoom, and I gladly accepted it. During that time, I had never used Zoom before, but I knew that it was a piece of technology that people used to communicate with their family and friends during the pandemic, when we couldn't be near anyone. Luckily, my young cousin helped me with practicing, in order for me to be prepared for the presentation. Plus, I was also required to use Zoom to save for my first sign language class I signed up from Triads Deaf Service, which was done in the same month, and instead of taking the classes in-person, we end up doing virtual classes, but textbook was definitely required.

I have mentioned on the Henry Ford Museum presentation in the first topic I posted in January 2022, which was sharing the very first four drawings of George Balanchine's ballet piece Ballo de Regina and left you all a link if you want to participate the program. It was a fun program, I was very nervous, but after presenting my PowerPoint presentation with my artwork and the blog, it was definitely a really cool experience, and I will always be grateful to everyone from the Henry Ford Museum and to all of the speakers who have joined the program. Thank you to everyone! And I also wanted to thank Triad Deaf Services for letting me take the classes. There's another thing I'll always be grateful for 2022 was me getting to learn and study American Sign Language (ASL), learning about Deaf community, and loving it. In the 46th Watercolor of the Month topic I posted on Christmas Day, I was finally able to share a fun Christmas video of me signing Christmas greetings in ASL, just because I did say that someday I'll have to share you a video of me signing, and I was brave enough to do it, so I hope you enjoyed it.

Now, moving on to the second part that changed my life in year 2022 that I will always be totally grateful for was having my very first guest appearance on a podcast. I was so lucky to be asked by Mason Milne if I can come in and be one of his guest speakers on his podcast Crohn's and Autism Awareness Advocate during the Autism Awareness Month in April, where I shared my story, talking about my love for animation, why is it so important to me, our favorite animated Disney movies, and why do I choose that as a career. We did the interview on Zoom, recorded on March 7th, and it premiered on YouTube on April 12th, and I posted the topic on the same day as the podcast premiered, as well as leaving a full link, so you can click on it and watch it. I was also lucky to come back to Mason's podcast for the second time to join along with the other speakers to conclude the Autism Awareness series at the end of April. Then, I was able to come back to join with the same group who were in the final episode, with the group called Autism Mutuals to do a Christmas reunion special. We recorded it on Zoom on November 19th, and premiered on December 22nd, and then again, I shared a topic on it and left you all a full link, too.

It was definitely a fun and amazing experience to be featured on my very first podcast appearance. It's very funny how I became interested in listening to podcasts after discovering it by watching and listening to an animation addicts podcast with the Rotoscopers, and there are other podcasts I've listened to. But now, I was asked to join and be a guest speaker on a podcast for the very first time, and I will never forget it. If you would like to check out Mason's podcast, please go listen to his podcast called Crohn's and Autism Awareness Advocate, where he talks about his advocacy of autism and Crohn's disease, and his love for Doctor Who, which that was the year that I got to watch the series and loved it. His podcast is available on his YouTube channel, Spotify, and Apple iTunes.

Third: Teaming up with blogger Andrew Sateriale, who contacted me on Instagram to ask me if I can do fan art illustrations for any of his fan fiction, which I end up picking the Finding Dory-inspired fan fictional story called Finding Bailey and worked on total of eight drawings in digital drawing. Second project I did for Andrew was the Olaf Presents fan fiction pieces, inspired by the Olaf Presents shorts from the Disney film, Frozen (2013). I end up doing concept drawings of Olaf, Sven, Marshmallow, and Snowgies playing all different characters in reacting from Disney classics, such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Mulan (1998), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Cinderella (1950), and The Jungle Book (1967). Olaf was definitely a fun character to draw, including the Snowgies (they're so cute!!!). Right now, the third project I'm working for Andrew is a Pokémon fan art, come up with designs for his own Pokémon creatures and human characters for his upcoming Pokémon fan fiction. If you like to read Andrew's posts on fan fiction and movie review, please check out his blog called Andrew's Corner.

These are the experiences that I'll forever be grateful, and so, I'll be looking forward to the future I'll experience for this year.

Future Projects Coming in 2023

So, what are the future art projects and topics that will be coming up in 2023? Well, I have a couple of projects I am working on that'll be coming up this year, in which I think it'd be better if I started off with the two new projects.

The first one I'll began with is The Elephant Man story illustration project, in which I am still working on. I have mentioned it from the previous topic in November 2022 by sharing you all the concept drawings of the real-life characters, as well as sharing the very first three artwork illustrations. All of the drawings will be done in digital drawing from the Autodesk SketchBook software, at 1400 x 1080. In that topic, I wrote that I'll be going to see the play of The Elephant Man from the Players' Guild Theatre. I have seen the play version from watching the 1982 TV film with Philip Algrim and Kevin Conway, so it'll be my first time seeing it live on stage.

The goal is to illustrate the history of Joseph Merrick as followed directly through Frederick Treves' memoir The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, drawn in the classic animation style, and then, posted the illustrations in the same month as when I'll be seeing the play. However, I think it would be better to change the schedule. The reason why is because my mom and I will be seeing it on Saturday night on January 28th, and right now, I only have seven finished drawings. Illustrating does take a while, even few months, but it shouldn't take too long. I still don't know how much drawings I'll be doing, but just in case if there's a lot, I'll have to separate into two or three parts. Hopefully, I can get the project done sometime in February. I'm definitely very excited for this project, and I cannot wait to share the drawings on this blog. I hope the illustrations will make a very wonderful tribute.

If you like, maybe this would be a great idea, for me to share like rough drawings of the illustrations and save it as like a next topic, please let me know in the comments. If not, no big deal! The drawings will be on this blog soon!

Next one I have is a second Helen Keller watercolor drawing, and it's an illustrative drawing of a young adult Helen Keller reading her raised print book in the study room. The first watercolor drawing I did on Helen Keller was an illustration of her as a little girl standing by the water pump with her hand touching the water out of the spout, and that was when she realizes that, between touching and spelling w-a-t-e-r in sign language, understood the meaning of the word. Of course, that ends up becoming an iconic moment in the play and for the 1962 film The Miracle Worker. That was posted last June to honor for Keller's birthday (June 24th).

For this upcoming drawing on the adult Helen Keller, this will be a full colorized illustrated version of the pen drawing of her reading from year 2021, which I shared on Instagram and Facebook. It's basically a caricatured drawing, based on the photograph of the real Helen Keller reading her raised print book in the study room, which I believe it must've been taken at Radcliffe college, where Keller took her studies. I have a copy of Keller's memoir, The Story of My Life since November 2021, and it shows the exact same picture. I used both the picture from the book and the pen drawing as couple of references and guides to draw Helen Keller reading exactly as how I did for the pen drawing, and just put that into the watercolor artwork, and adding the study room background. I started on Christmas-week, and finished it on Saturday, January 7th.

It'll officially be posted by next week, naming it as the first artwork to be shared in year 2023.

So, those are the upcoming projects I'm working on. For other topics like ballet, Harry Potter, fan art, etc., those will have to wait. But I do have one idea for the ballet drawings, and whenever I'll go back to work on new ballet drawings, I would like to do drawings of the Precious Stones from The Sleeping Beauty. I think those would be fun. If you like, just to help out, want to leave a request on which scene from any of the Harry Potter books you would like for me to illustrate, please leave me one in the comments below.

Which one of the upcoming projects are you most excited to see? Please share one in the comments down below. Have a very happy new year! Here's to the next four years for The Autistic Animator's Desk!