Improvement Meme

Ages ago, I filled out the 2003-2009 sections of this meme and it was just sitting on my computer for ages ever since, but I decided to add a 2010 section at the end, and then a 'prior to 2003' section at the beginning to show really old art, and now I'm uploading it!

OBLIGATORY UPDATE FOR 2011/2012!@!!1

Original meme: [link]

IT HAS BEEN A LONG JOURNEY.

I also probably want to add a bit to the comments for each year because there wasn't much space to write as much as I wanted for each year to the left there. (I could have made the font smaller, but uh... but still!!1 No!) I'll just write more here.


1998 - 2002
I'm not actually sure if that early artwork IS from 1998... I THINK that at least that dragon in the first box there is was from around that time, but the rest are sort of a mystery. Around that time of my life, most of what I drew were my own made up variations of Yoshi. I have a book full of about 200 of these creature things that all have names ending in 'shi', like that brown and green 'Dragogashi'. I also drew somewhat charizard-inspired dragons. Oh and gel pens. I coloured loads of things in gel pens. My favourite ones being the sparkly kinds.

Drawing was just one of those things I did that I enjoyed and I'd not really thought much about getting super amazingly good. I liked to think that I was good at drawing though. For my age, at least.

I also liked drawing things with headbands and spiked collars because those sorts of things are like, so totally cool, y'know?!

2003
I was introduced to neondragonart.com and saw tutorials there which got me acquainted with the whole idea of using construction lines to build drawings from a simple skeleton/stick-like drawing of the pose of something, then drawing other basic shapes over that, refining the details, etc. I felt like I'd suddenly gained magical powers since that drastically improved my ability to draw and drastically improved my enthusiasm too. I was so excited to draw anything at all because this idea was so new to me and I could draw things in more interesting poses than just *standing there in profile* and I learned to think about muscle structure and anatomy.

*neondragon's website also had Photoshop tutorials and I read them with great interest since the whole concept of digital art was new to me as well. I eventually got a scanner so I could draw things and post them on the Neondragonart forums, and my scanner came with a program called Photo Studio 5, which I used to colour the two digital art pieces shown here. To my disappointment, it didn't have the magical and wonderful 'layers' that *neondragon's tutorials taught me about, so I had to use the magic wand tool to select areas inside my lines to colour them...

This is also the year I discovered deviantART and various other talented artists whose work inspired me.

2004
I have Photoshop now! Wow! Gasp! I was so excited to be able to use this magical program I had been reading about. 'Wow! I can finally use this brush that's represented by a circle! Ooh, opacity and flow! Eeee, layers!' and so on. I'd do all my sketches and line art on paper, scan it into Photoshop, and start the lengthy process of colouring with my mouse. I liked trying to make sparkly/glowy/shiny effects, so uh... that's what I did. Tried to do those things, I did. I often used Photoshop sparkle brush things.

2005
I think this is the year I got my tablet (a Wacom Intuos 3. I'm still using the same one) and also tried dabbling in the world of lineless artwork. Mostly though, I still used line art either drawn digitally over a scanned sketch, or drawn with a black pen and scanned. I coloured a lot of pencil sketches without proper clean lines as well. My tablet came with a Painter Essentials 2.0, so I used that for art on occasions. I liked to use the pencil tool since it made such thin, crisp lines compared to Photoshop.

I think the novelty of my new drawing skills/knowledge and Photoshop may have been beginning to wear off and I was finding myself struggling emotionally with feelings of 'not being good enough' or feeling disappointment about my own limits when I found that there were many ideas in my mind that I couldn't draw. I ogled the artwork of people like *beastofoblivion and ~GunnerRomantic and was so wowed and amazed by their skills! I was at least able to feel excited about the thought that if I practise a lot, I might be able to do what they can do one day!

2006
So apparently not much art was created this year, though I don't really know why. I can't remember this year very well at all... I redesigned my website... I probably wanted to make a webcomic or something. I suppose most of what I did that year was confined to whatever sketchbook I may have had at the time. Who knows!

2007
A much more productive year! I really put all my effort into some of the pieces I did that year (particularly those ones in the first two boxes) and did a more serious exploration of colour and lineless painting. I also tried to create some more original-looking creature designs. It was an experimental year. I may have stopped using Painter Essentials this year...

2008
A year where I felt like I was really getting somewhere, improving my digital painting skills, working out new techniques, trying to use a variety of different colour palettes, and really focusing on drawing proper scenery for backgrounds. Until this year, most of my backgrounds were added as an afterthought just to give whatever creature I'd been focused on drawing a place to be. Now backgrounds were being used as a significant part of my paintings and I discovered the joys of painting plants and rocks and whatever else - things which I'd previously thought of as 'boring'.

2009
My focus on scenery in artwork continues into this year. I also continue to try to draw creatures from my own imagination, not restricting myself mainly to dragons. I made more art this year than in any other, and began to experiment a lot with textures near the end of the year.

I learned more about colour and tried to get experimental with that, adding various almost 'random' colours which I thought might look good if I took a big brush and slopped some colour onto some areas of the canvas at a low opacity. It felt like it made a difference in the depth of the colour in my images. I also learned about secondary light sources and edge lighting, eventually trying to include those.

There were probably a lot of ups and downs with the pleasedness whenever I did complete a piece of artwork that I could be happy with, and the displeasedness when I felt like I couldn't draw anything worth colouring or felt like the colours in my art didn't want to come out looking very good, et cetera, et cetera. I probably forced myself to do a lot of the art I did...

2010
Surprisingly not very productive...! Especially considering the art output of the previous year. I suppose I wanted to stop forcing myself to draw when I didn't want to, which resulted in less finished artwork, but probably helped to make art not seem so emotionally tormenting.

I learned a lot about anatomy this year, taking references and things much more seriously. I'd draw animals from photos as practise and study muscles and skeletons of animals using a book called An Atlas of Animal Anatomy for Artists. I continued to learn more about light and colour, and was getting better at visualising my subjects as 3D objects. I tried to get better at foreshortening, though that's probably more noticeable in my sketchbook than in my actual completed artwork.

2011
Actually productive art year?! It's hard to remember the defining characteristics of 2011 looking back at it now that it's 2013... I was discovering a greater satisfaction in painting proper scenery in my backgrounds and switched partially from a 'what kind of background do I put the character in?' line of thinking to more of a 'what kind of character do I put in the scenery?' one. Still have a lot to learn about realistic lighting and contrast, but I made progress. I got more serious and started doing speed paintings of photos of forests/mountains/etc. I took up gesture drawing as well, learning about human anatomy and believable posing. I often had trouble figuring out what I wanted to draw, but managed to conjure up some ideas I was interested enough in seeing through to the end.

2012
I was feeling pretty drained for all sorts of reasons and was busy arranging to go to school and such, so I mostly let go of trying to force myself to do more art than I really wanted to. I figured my brain probably needed a break and that if inspiration hit me, it could do so on its own time and I wasn't going to force it. Studying Japanese was keeping me busy in the meantime. A lot of things changed for me in this year: one long chapter of my life ended and a new one began. I now had school to focus on and was meeting new people for the first time in a long time. I started to wish I had more time for art or that I'd get hit with a bout of irresistible artistic motivation; I missed the feeling of being immersed in a painting. The most that happened though was sketching. I did Life Drawing at school and that taught me a lot about balanced poses and human anatomy. I feel like I gathered a lot of new art knowledge during this year, I just didn't really test my new knowledge in painting format.

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It's 2013 now and uh. What to say about that? Like I said in the 2012 description, I feel like I've collected a lot of art knowledge that I haven't taken for much of a test drive yet. I've been doodling things in my 'spare time' and am quite interested in colouring stuff or getting together ideas for more digital paintings, but we'll see how much success I have coming up with things...! It's easy for me to get stuck trying to think of ideas that I'm really excited about; I have a lot of "but is it really that good, or could I come up with something better to spend my time on instead?" thoughts when considering my next art piece, and then I get nowhere. I need to learn to let go of The Search For The Best Idea so I can just paint things whether the idea behind them is particularly original or profound or not. It doesn't matter! I just want to make pretty pictures, maaaaannn!!!

_{This snippet can stay here for posterity:}
And now it's 2011 and I feel my passion for art returning! Like I'm really getting somewhere and enjoy the time I spend sketching and colouring things, which I'm trying to do for practise as much as I can! Hopefully it will be a productive art year, but I won't put the pressure on myself to make art just for the sake of having lots of things to look at in my gallery since that's taken the joy out of art before. I want to go back to excited-about-drawing-stuff mode!

That's a lot of text. You didn't have to read it. But congratulations if you did anyway.