Reflections on 2024
& Cue Excitement for 2025
Do you do any reflection at the end of the year? This has become a bigger part of my annual process as my art practice, and now art business (it still feels weird to say that), continue to grow and evolve in ways I never anticipated. I recently finished the book The Gap & the Gain by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan and it suggested that it is a much more powerful exercise to measure your success by looking backwards at the past version of yourself rather than measuring based on the future ideal you are working towards. This perspective shift to measuring my wins, rather than where I missed the mark, has left me feeling so proud of myself and so excited to see what the next year has in store for me.
For 2024, I picked three words to guide my year: growth, strength, and friendship. This was the first year I chose more than one word, but I wanted to make progress in these three areas of my life. They were intentionally not all art related, but whether I am feeling like a happy, healthy, and supported person 100% impacts my art practice. Let’s dive in.
Growth
I chose this word for my art practice because I was starting to notice gaps in my knowledge and my skills. I wanted to stretch myself and learn new things, while also maintaining my current art activities like blogging, painting, etc.
Samples from the Tread collection.
My biggest accomplishment by far was completing the 2024 Immersion Surface Pattern Design online course with Bonnie Christine. This course lasted from February through May 2024 and taught me how to gather inspiration, create artwork, was a comprehensive course in Adobe Illustrator, and also included modules on making income from your artwork and creative entrepreneurship. At the end of the four month process, I created my very first fabric collection that is available on fabric, home decor, and more on Spoonflower. More than just teaching me hard skills like new software and how to design fabric, it put me in an online community with an amazingly diverse group of people (3000+ people!). There were people in this course that already have successful six or seven figure businesses. It exposed me to a world and ideas that I didn’t even know existed. To say it was life changing is probably an understatement. It was also a ton of work. I spent between fifteen and twenty hours a week on this course to try and make it through everything while the program was live, but I am so glad I did. I’ve also a part of Bonnie’s membership, Flourish. As I look towards 2025, creating a second fabric collection is at the top of my list as well as ongoing professional development through. Flourish.
My first fabric collection: Tread is available now on Spoonflower. One FREE way that you can support me is by favoriting those patterns that you like.
TREAD is a collection that celebrates the roads we travel and the marks we leave behind. This collection is inspired by historic automobiles, vintage fashion, and art deco designs.
For 2024, I also told myself that I was going to try to develop a sketchbook practice for both watercolor and drawing. I worked in both sketchbooks over the course of the year, but my drawing sketchbook is by far the most filled at this point. I found that I really enjoy drawing with my fine liner pens. It felt very meditative to draw in my sketchbook where the only purpose was to have fun and be creative. Many of the drawings are terrible, but some of them turned into ideas that I decided to explore further in watercolor. I have even started to create drawings outside my sketchbook as finished pieces that I might sell or give away at some point. While I do not consider myself a consistent sketchbook user, I think it improved my mindset when it comes to showing up. I became more comfortable with drawing for thirty minutes even when I wasn’t happy with the end result. It made me more willing to take risks and experiment, and this ease with experimentation carried over into my watercolor paintings. My entire series of watercolor abstracts that I am still painting started as tiny thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook. I might actually finish a sketchbook in the coming year, which I have never done before.
I painted a lot this year. I’m feeling like I have more of a style than I have ever had before. I’m more confident when I am painting and less worried about if something comes out the way I expect. Unfortunately, I did go through a couple periods of burnout and stress when it came to my art practice. The summer was really hard at my day job, which left me more drained than I usually feel in the summer. I still managed to paint, but I felt frustrated at myself that I was not producing as much and what I produced was not necessarily my favorite. In the end, I had to let go of the idea that I was going to paint as much as I did last summer during my annual Summer Vibes Project. Surprisingly, after a period of rest and travel at the end of the summer, I found myself in the middle of a creative painting burst that still has not slowed. I have been painting a lot and painting in new ways. (Check out Fall Landscapes or Watercolor Abstracts over on the blog to see.) I’m excited to see where this creative burst takes me in the new year.
Another thing that I didn’t have on my dream list for 2024 was starting my Etsy shop: JGagnonDesignsStudio. I was finding that I was accumulating a growing stack of artwork that I really liked, but it was more paintings than I really needed to keep. So I decided to take a leap and open an Etsy shop. Even in its early days (we opened in November) it is proving to be a place to experiment and practice. And I’ve already sold some pieces. 2023 Jesse would never have even imagined that.
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Strength
My second word for the year was strength. At the start of the year, I was feeling a little rudderless because I had no real climbing goals or bike events on the calendar for the upcoming year. A big milestone for me was making fitness choices based on what was going to feel good or right for my body rather than what I felt that I should be doing. I went on bike rides because I wanted to, not because I had a mileage goal to hit. Vasya and I hiked a ton, which was also a great change from last year when our priorities were just on other things. Many of our hikes ended up serving as reference photos and inspiration for many of the paintings and drawings in my sketchbook.
Eccles Pass, Silverthorne Colorado
Two books also made a big impact on how I approached food, which I am finding is just as important to my strength goals as physical exercise.
Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power of Balancing Your Blood Sugar
Glucose Revolution by French biochemist Jessie Inchauspé really influenced how I approach sugar. I am not big into sweets, but the book really made me pay attention to where there was unnecessary sugar in my diet. It also provided interesting insight for how our bodies process sugar based on the other things that we are eating (like vegetables and fiber), the order that we eat things (like eating your vegetables before your starches at a meal), and the impact that exercising after you eat (like taking a walk) can change how your body absorbs sugar. The book had a trendy health vibe at times, but I learned a lot and changed my eating habits in some small ways:
My breakfast now has a lot more protein, fiber, and less sugar.
I try to take a walk as often as I can at work after lunch.
We signed up for a farm share to try and incorporate more vegetables into our meals.
Ultraprocessed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food
Ultraprocessed People by Chris van Tulleken is a deep dive into ultraprocessed food (UPFs), the short definition of which is “if it’s wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t find in your kitchen, it’s UPF.” We’re talking preservatives, thickeners, emulsifiers, natural flavors, all those things that make you go, what is that awkward ingredient name that I cannot pronounce. This book is less of an “eat this, not that” book than a look at our industrial food system and how there is little regulation regarding what constitutes food rather than a cheap (literally cheap) impersonation of food. It is also a commentary on how much of our food system makes it really hard to eat healthy. Making food from scratch and making whole and clean food choices is time consuming and expensive, so it also gives ideas for some simple changes you could make. As a result, I have changed a bunch of my eating habits:
I no longer drink juice. I drink a lot more tea and make sure to have lots of different varieties in the apartment. Especially decaf!
I no longer eat cereal. My breakfast is usually oatmeal, seeds, and nuts.
If I want ice cream, we go out and get local homemade ice cream. I’ve even made no churn ice cream at home once!
I sadly have given up Oreos, but I bake a lot more cookies at home instead.
Friends
At the start of 2024 I was feeling a bit lonely, which is why I chose friends and friendship as one of my words. I felt like I did not have a very robust friend network. This was partly due to my introverted nature and that you were likely to find me on a solo bike ride or painting at home in my free time. I also was feeling like I had dropped the ball in reaching out to friends, both here in Colorado and those that I have in previous places I have lived, like Rhode Island, Delaware and New Hampshire. So in 2024 I wanted to be better and I definitely made progress.
Wine tasting in Washington State.
I reconnected with a dear friend who was my ride or die when I lived in Delaware. I didn’t realize how much I missed her until we started face timing on a semi-regular basis and when she came out to visit me for my birthday (!) this year. I made a concerted effort to call my best friend from high school more and to take advantage of her new job that had her visiting Colorado for conferences more than usual. I finally visited a friend from college and his family in Washington state when Vasya and I went on our anniversary trip in August.
I also found some invaluable new friendships through the study group I joined as part of my Immersion group. Throughout the course this group of seven women (including me) met every week to share our wins and our next steps. The group has been so valuable to all of us that we are still meeting every week to talk about what we are working on. It has made a huge impact on my life and I can see it showing up in my work as they encourage me and push me to stick with my goals and keep going. I’m excited to see what we come up with in 2025.
Admittedly, I did not make any new bike friends. I did join a cycling group and went to a few meetings, but I did not go on any bike rides. But I realized that I really do value my alone time, especially on the bike. It is how I decompress and after an intense summer, I needed those quiet rides to recharge and regroup. I haven’t given up on that goal entirely and as I decide whether to sign up for bike events in 2025, I think that might give me the incentive I need to be brave and meet new people.
My 2024 Milestones
Completed the Immersion Surface Design Course.
Joined the Flourish, the Immersion only alumni membership.
Celebrated my 10 year wedding anniversary with Vasya.
Traveled to Washington State for the first time.
Created my first fabric collection, Tread, available now on Spoonflower.
Launched my Etsy shop JGagnonDesignsStudio.
Completed 30 blog posts.
Sent 18 newsletters.
Too much artwork to count.
What are your successes from the year?
Let me know in the comments below! And follow me over on Instagram to see what 2025 has in store for me.
Do you have big dreams and goals?
Check out My Yearly Plan, my planning guide I use to set myself up for success. I'll be reflecting on how my 2024 went and how I'm planning for 2025 in an upcoming blog, but why wait?