Mooncalendar 2024

Year of the Dragon

Was the idea for this years calendar.

In chinese zodiac

2024 is the year of the Dragon.

I drew the first sketch of a dragon and never looked back.

Not sure if I should spend more time in the sketch&idea phase in general but it’s the same with everything. I usually just go with the first idea and sketch and then spend way too much time with everything else with it.

This years calendar reminds me of the very first mooncalendar I made, because they both have the illustration made specifically for the calendar.

In my other mooncalendars I used my art drawings because I didn’t have time to do the illustration at that time.

Play

The energy with making mooncalendars is having fun and not being serious about it, and thats what I like about making them, as well as the learning new tricks part.

I like playing with fonts and I see now reason why you can’t use as many as possible..

I also learned to play with color in the illustration but also in fonts. People probably don’t even notice it that much, but I’m very proud of the coloring of the letters.

I also put my energy into making the calendar as informative as I can. This is the second year i put the time of day below each new and fullmoon. For anyone who uses it for spell purposes.

This year I made two different sizes: 30x40 and 21x28.

The bigger is fancier but small is compact and easily posts via letter. Practical.

Also I couldn’t choose the color so the big is more yellow and small more pinkish. When I was actually aiming for green. The yellow pushed through because I used old look- tricks.

The tricks to make it look old and worn out were the most time consuming part and something new for this project.

I was aiming for the feeling like it’s an old chinese calendar. I don’t know why. Old is gold?

One of my toxic traits is that when ever I look at the calendar after it’s finished, I still proof read the texts and fear that I have a mistake somewhere. Even though I have done it a million times.

Looking back at my old calendars I can see the growth in my skills.

Before my first calendar I had never done any digital stuff other than few school assignments with the one course we had on graphic design over ten years ago, while the studies focused on intaglio printmaking and artmaking. So basically I just learn as I go and it’s also part of the fun.

I still struggle with things and if I had wrote this right after making the calendar there would be excessive whining about a lot of things.. Most of my struggles however come from inadequate equipment. Like a calibrated screen which is still just a distant dream in the horizon.