good ol art improvement meme

i primarly working in paint and simple facebook drawing apps. this is when i originally tried digital art but for the most part was still creating things with fully traditional mediums. i also had a strong fondness for packing tons of little details into every piece i'd make!

around this time was when i did mostly still lifes as well since it's what everyone around me wanted me to do. tbh i wasn't really into them but what can ya do!

watercolors, markers, colored pencils, and ballpoint pens were my best friends.

i spent a considerable amount of time working with more traditional things this year as well! the art class i took in school hated all things digital so i wasn't really allowed to do much with it.

i also sold my first piece this year! the first one shown, the pumpkin guy with fireflies. some lady for a magazine bought it i think?

this is when i jumped fully over to iscribble for digital instead of facebook or MSpaint. i enjoyed group drawing a lot! having a close community surrounding art and roleplay meant a lot to me and motivated me a lot.

i also. was neck deep in homestuck at this point. i had started reading in late 2009 but only sparingly and i didn't care much or understand until i was 15. this is the year when i really started doing fan works. a LOT of fan works.

for my birthday this year i also got my first tablet and went to town! i wanted to paint really bad after seeing the gorgeous art made by folks i looked up to so near the very end i got sai and started working with it.

i switched to photoshop halfway through this year! i preferred it for how i worked and found it suited my painting style better than sai. i experimented a TON this year with different stylies and processes. doing every possible thing i could in my free time when i wasn't being destroyed by school work.

i scanned in my works a lot and would paint them as well! it lead to a lot of neat works.

this is also the year when i did my first huge shift onto working with my comic and browbirds, they would both see many more changes but this is when i became more serious!

it was pretty rough though since digital still was not approved at the school so a lot of digital i made was squeezed into every little moment of free time i had.

more painting, more experimenting! trying so hard to get noticed to no avail.

i graduated this year from high school. right after i drastically improved in every possible way now that i was free from the burden of school.

school put me in an absolutely HORRID mindset and i didn't fully realize it until i was free

i also joined another rp group around this time, which was a HUGE motivator for me. close communities always really push me so i absolutely adored a lot of what i made during this time!

life was still hard but thankfully i finally started feeling better about my stuff. i posted far more of it online and was more open to talking about art with people!

learned how to draw hands this year. and other anatomy stuff. but it would be a long process until i was confident with it.

also really started practicing with animals and focusing on character designs.

lots of practicing with painting and styles, i started to grasp the direction i wanted to push my work.

i shifted focus more to doing adoptables. i improved in drawing consistently as well as anatomy, flow, and other design aspects but i ended up making far less personal art and illustrations in the process.

more adopts and more anatomy practice. i got better at basically everything in a technical sense. this is also when backgrounds came into play. i thought "why not just start drawing more backgrounds" and just... did it somehow?? wild.

did big fancy character paintings and detailed rendered character designs. as well as an absolute MASSIVE amount of adoptables with a huge variety to them.

worked more on composition, flow, poses, and of course... backgrounds.

took commissions again finally. did an entire scene piece. anatomy is pretty good now and i can usually sketch stuff out without too much fussing! i think i like where my style is going but i really want to keep working and push it further. there's still so much i want to learn! i already have a ton of things planned to finish early next year...