we're getting real close to the conclusion of this year! i usually do an art summary graphic at the end of each year since i started drawing sometime in late 2019-early 2020. i figured i'd show off the ones i've done up until now, so here they are!:
annnnnd, finally now, for 2023!:
i wanted to reflect a bit on my art journey thus far. i remember starting out in november 2019 because i had an account on a character hosting site called toyhouse and i was running out of birthday/christmas money to commission people there, as i didn't and hadn't ever had a job at the time. i also felt jealous at the time that people could just draw whatever they wanted. i thought, "it must be nice to think of your ocs in a situation and be able to draw them how you envision it."
i've had my ocs for around a decade at that point, so they meant a lot to me. i felt that if i wanted to take them to the next level in my head and content, i had to learn how to draw. so i dug out by small $20 huion tablet i had gotten as a birthday gift for when i was getting into osu, and began to draw on it.
at first, i exclusively drew girls. this phase lasted for around a year and a half. i thought girls made a lot more sense in my brain and it was easier for me to draw "cute" than the cool kind of guys i wanted to draw. i took on and off breaks this first year and a half because i got frustrated really easily. i felt i couldn't express what i envisioned at all, and looking back, i think it's because my sense of vision was just way more developed than my skills at the time. i had looked at a lot of anime art and consumed it regularly back then, so that made sense.
if i'm honest, i never got around to working on "fundamentals". i still haven't, actually, though i do intend to one day. i think that's the path i want to take though, because i want to enjoy drawing first and foremost, and studies or exercises bore me to death. i recently saw a video on youtube from a professional korean artist saying something similar though: that beginner artists should just draw what they want and practise studies and fundies when they run out of ideas they want to draw. i think this method works for some people, not all, but it definitely was the one that kept me drawing.
2021 was kinda where i hit my skill ceiling for a long time. that year i only drew girls still, only drew on colour-filled or blank backgrounds, and rarely tried anything new. towards the end of 2021 was when i started to get most frustrated. i think it was around this time that i realised, if i didn't try new things and to expand my horizons through "failure", i wouldn't grow anymore.
2022 was a year of a lot of growth for sure. it marked many firsts for me: first time i drew a real background, first time i drew more than one character in a piece (i was super afraid of this for the longest time because i thought i wouldn't be able to match the proportions correctly haha), first time i tried in earnest to draw my guy characters.
this year, 2023, has felt soooo long. when putting together my yearly summary, i actually felt like i drew many of the earlier month's pieces in the middle of last year. i think i've grown tremendously this year and i'm really proud of it. i picked up painting somewhere near the beginning of this year (for reference, i call it painting when i don't do clear lineart or colouring and merge the layers early on), had another stint where i mostly did lineart but painted a little at the end, and ended the year painting once again. i think painting is slowly but surely ingraining itself into my process. one of my big inspirations for painting is a japanese illustrator named lack. i want to achieve proficiency with painting like he has!
i'm a little worried going into 2024, not gonna lie. i'm graduating uni in the spring and will probably have to find a full time job again some point, which will leave me much less time to pursue drawing. i love art a ton, it's definitely my favourite hobby, bringing me so much joy and meaning, and the thought that i might have to cut down on it drastically is a little scary. but i believe that no matter what happens, as long as drawing is this important to me, i will always find time to draw when i can. so here's to many more years of drawing and improvement and happiness!
so i've been thinking about the way i draw lately and i thought it'd be cool to air my thoughts out here. i will probably make another post regarding my art later into this month, as an end of the year art reflection kind of thing.
i usually draw with a huion kamvas 13, which i really enjoy using. i got it in summer of 2022 and it's definitely been a good friend to me. i couldn't really take it anywhere with me though, and so a few months ago i got another screenless tablet. prior to this, i had only used really small wacom screenless tablets and i didn't enjoy the experience. it kinda soured my opinion of screenless tablets in general since i figured they'd all be a hassle to use.
i ended up getting a deco 01 v2 xp pen tablet, specifically, the line friends one. i tried bringing it around a few times and drew maybe one thing with it, but since i had drawn exclusively with a screen tablet for over a year, i found the adjustment difficult. i kinda just kept it around as a backup for a long time.
but i started using it again a lot more recently, and i have to say, the experience is super smooth and i might be starting to enjoy this over my kamvas. the primary reason is that i don't really have a great setup for my kamvas, and as a result i find my arm and elbow aching when i draw for long periods of time. i have it propped up on the stand atop a few textbooks to the right of my keyboard, and though the setup serves its purpose, it's not the most comfortable.
i've also found that using the xp pen tablet has made me focus less on unimportant details. maybe it's just because of this transition period and the fact that i'm still more unfamiliar with this tablet, but i find that i scrutinise over details people won't see a lot less while using it.
i've been thinking of looking into using the side buttons on the tablet too, honestly. there's side buttons on my kamvas, but it was always super awkward to use them. i still feel like side buttons on tablet are kinda awkward in general, as i am so used to keyboard shortcuts. i can't really fit all the shortcuts i need on just a few side buttons anyways, so i usually end up defaulting back to keyboard as well. but i have been interested in incorporating it into my work at some point too, just to try it out. currently, the commands i use at least a handful times every drawing are as follows: ctrl+c, ctrl+v, ctrl+d, ctrl+a, ctrl+x, ctrl+t, k, m, b, g, 1, 2, and 3. everything else i just end up clicking, but i kinda wanna map those to something eventually as well. i only have 8 buttons on my tablet, so i have no idea how i'd streamline this to fit. i've been thinking of just mapping the non ctrl commands, but i have yet to test that out. some day soon, though, i will.
woo! first blog post milestone :3 *cracks knuckles* it's time to talk about one of my big interests here!!
since around 2011, i have played a small fan mmo on and off. it's called pokemon mystery universe, or pmu for short. it's, as its name suggests, a pokemon mystery dungeon mmo, though it plays nothing like any of the pmd games. it's barely an mmo either given how much is solo play...but that's besides the point.
i've been developing a team lately! still pick and choosing certain members and being all over the place, but so far it's looking like this:
it's a full shiny team too! the pokemon that i had in the pool for choosing as part of this team were dhelmise, ninetales, lickilicky, floette, cherrim, sceptile, vileplume, togekiss, and appletun. i am still trying to choose between floette or cherrim as my mascot(and also as ren!), so that's still up in the air. dhelmise is representative of halvatt, the shiny version's seaweed reminds me of his hair. ninetales is aidan! and the vileplume is my boyfriend (he's stinky). this team is primarily designed to run in sunny weather, though it is very item dependent.
this is my custom floette oc! designed to reflect ren a little more. art is by purranoir from the pmu discord. i'm hoping to do a christmas themed piece of my floette oc soon, so keep an eye out for that. i've also been debating what names i want to give my mons. currently, they're named after vocaloid songs i like, but i kinda wanna also give them actual names. considering the name "tear" for my floette at the moment. her song name is deep sea girl though haha. i will definitely talk about vocaloid in a later post, it's another one of my main interests.
i've recently also become an administrator of my guild, which is the biggest and most active guild in game currently! i hope to be a good admin; i don't recruit as much as other people do and i'm not quite as active between art, time with non-in-game friends, and college, but i still do my best to help and want to make sure things run as smoothly as possible. anyways, i'm hoping to host an art raffle for christmas for everyone in my guild, possibly an icon or maybe even a fullbody. pokemon art will be incoming for sure...to finish off this post, here's an old pokemon art i've done of my friend ashenheart's primarina oc (i can draw non humanoids totally!! just not as familiar with it):
