Farewell 2025!

It was a year of beauty, a year of authenticity, a year of the strifes but also a year of the blessings. I am happy to announce that I think 2025 was a very good year for me! This year, as every year it seems (and will continue to be, ha), was a revolutionary year for my art, and my artistic growth.

I created many stories this year, some I will share in the near future and some I may never, and that is alright. I saw many beautiful sights of nature, from the blue sea so close to me to the cold trees shivering alongside me. I painted, drew, made digital art, journaled, scrapbooked, and created many artworks I am sorely proud of.

At the beginning of the blog post, I have a collage of 2025 art to showcase my favorite artworks from each month. The idea of “months” happens to help me organize the year in my head. Each month has a different vibe or connection that goes along with the art I chose for the collage.

Someway, somehow, I can’t believe I self-published my children’s book just last year, yet at the same time it feels like yesterday. It is something I am so thankful for, an experience that changed the course of all 2025, I think.

January and February were both cold months, full of scholarship, art, reading and my continuous obsession over J.R.R. Tolkien and The Silmarillion, which started when I was only nine and rekindled as the most blazing fire in late 2024. Thus, I created fanart after fanart of my favorite characters from his works. A certain coldness was in my bones at this time, yet not a bad one, for I love winter. Yet Tolkien’s works kept me cozy and warm, like a tough blanket as I deciphered word after word in my coats and scarves.

As Spring began to spread its blossoms like a bee traveling with a stash of pollen, poetry swept my heart away. I saw a lonely tree upon a pasture’s edge, and I wrote a poem about it.

Through March and April, I wrote poem after poem. Through May and June, I dabbled in softness, tending to the garden and painting amongst the flowers. Still a breeze was in the air, so I kept my hands in my pockets, and still a busy-ness clouded my brain until June came. But my heart was being pulled towards a time before me, a misty vibe of 19th century inspiration digging its way into my art.

Throughout this whole Spring, continuing into the Summer, I experimented with historical fashion, building a collection of a Victorian closet and jewelry hinting of the past. Oh, what a good feeling it was (and is) to run up and along the grass dressed like a century ago, pretending I was somewhere else! But no, no, I didn’t have to “pretend” anymore; I worked my uttermost hardest to create a romanticized and truly beautiful Summer for myself.

I’ve always have wanted to live in another time, or place, or fantasy, or story, even though each of those tales we modern peoples romanticize always have their strifes greater than ours. When I imagined my most dreamiest, most romantic dream for Summer, I imagined running through the biggest green field you ever did see, sky blue and mountains or trees in the distance, and rolling down its lanes and plains, and rejoicing.

I indulged in the most gloriously romanticized Summer I ever could have! This Summer I read 19th century literature, painted in the garden, studied art history, wrote poem after poem once again, and listened to all classical from Vivaldi to Liszt. I learned many songs on the piano, my favorite that I learned being Clair De Lune by Claude Debussy. The three arts, song, word, and paint, were in my heart; so amongst July and August my artwork tells a tale of the harnessed beauty between nature’s poetic heart and the great artists I studied.

As September came, I could feel the love and longing for autumn stirring in my heart once more. I wished for days to become cold, and short, and to curl up somewhere hidden and warm. I started my flexible homeschool back up in later September, after taking a break since June. Poems slightly dwindled and my mind blossomed with many densely confusingly packed stories and characters I began to write about, a tip-tap of a keyboard coming from my room at all times. My art was littered with ideas of made-up peoples and worlds, personalities conveyed in dialogue, a sense of delicate description. This continued into October, when life became busy.

I participated in the drawing challenge “Inktober” the whole month of October, a fun and interesting challenge. My Favorite Inktober drawing was the Banksy artwork I illustrated for the prompt “shredded”.

My 14th Birthday was in October, and so were many birthdays of family-members of mine. It was a busy but beautiful time, yet I was incredibly tired afterwards. It seemed one thing after another, as November came in like a flood, Autumn going by too fast. Yet I continued my typing away, making art of my strange, other-worldly ideas; at the same time being consumed in studies and school-projects, chasing after a constant schedule. Despite the busy-ness catching up with me at times, I still enjoyed much music, singing along without a care; and great ideas and epiphanies flooded my mind….

Then, December came and the classy-ness of winter returned! December was a busy month, yet it fulfilled my heart in the way a big, hearty slab of steak does, delicious and filling. Things became cold, and each and every day I complained about bristles of frosty spine, despite it being my own fault my bedroom window was left open, a habit from the breezy summer.

Once again, Tolkien’s literature swept me up in the endless tales of world building and beauty, knowledge I enjoyed to memorize, a perfect winter hobby. The Christmas spirit took me by heart, and I began to go on shopping spree after shopping spree, indulging in the smell of fresh wrapping paper and the gleam of Christmas lights, as well as the joy of decorating as wildly as Buddy the Elf did in Gimbels department store in the movie Elf.

Every year I give special artwork to my friends and family, and this year I thoroughly enjoyed making them each individual artworks, all while listening to Christmas music as I worked away. My favorite thing made I is a shipwreck along the Oregon Coast, done with a bit of graphite and a lot of longing in my heart. As I worked away, I began to smell the sea, and I began to taste adventure and history in some strange tongue of the mind.

And now Christmas is over, and there is only a few days left until 2025 is over too. I always become sad when Christmas is over; yes, I do indeed want to move on, and there is a tad bit of relief the busy-ness is over. Actually, there is much relief in the newness of a new year. And I remind myself to focus on that, the future, as daunting as it sometimes seems, as saddening leaving a cozy, focused time behind can be.

Once more January is here, and I often wonder if a year’s months will feel the same as they did the year before. The answer after each year is no, they do not.

Here comes 2026! And it will be like no other year, just like 2025 was like no other year.