7 Years of Art

In middle school, I picked up my very first sketchbook. It was absolutely terrible; it was the kind where they basically took a stack of computer pages and bound them together under a hard cover, which not only smudged horribly but started to fall apart within a couple of weeks.

But, by the end of junior high I had filled the entire thing cover to cover. There wasn't much of anything good in there--trust me, there wasn't--but the poor thing did have a torn cover, ripped pages, and smudged drawings for a reason! I'd fallen in love with art, even though I never imagined it'd be something I'd ever be good at.

So, below is a bit of a 'chronicle' to look back over my journey through art from when I started high school until now:

2004-2010 Improvement Meme by ~kaleeko on deviantART

(Yes, you have to click it to see it bigger!)

Here's some self portrait comparisons for an even better comparison of how I've progressed even just on one topic:

Ends in 2008, obviously.

The latest cartoon self-portrait I've done, from 2009. (Yes, Jennifer, you can see the two freckles! Hehe!

Course, it's interesting seeing how much I've changed physically on top of my art, but... It's really mostly just haircolor/length, ha! Yeah, I still look 12.

Yet, even a lot about my art hasn't changed. I still haven't learned how to correctly use color and shading, as all my drawings seem to look like I puked up a rainbow regardless of how the environment effects colors... The last four pieces I've done turned out fairly well in that regard, but they still aren't perfect. I have a loonng way to go, and it doesn't even have anything to do with my technical skill at drawing. Just coloring. Gah! I have so much work to do!

Alas, before I start rambling about how bad my art is--which, yes, you may disagree, but I'm no DaVinci yet--I will say that I am proud of what I've accomplished. I really have gone SO far... I mean, if you compare the above image to this:

there's a huge difference, and that's just over the course of 1 year. A year from now, I could be doing something even better...

But not if I keep pansying around like I am now. I did a grand total of 4 drawings last year. Four. All of them were done within 3 weeks of each other, and that was the end of it. It's incredibly disappointing for my progress in art, because if I'd actually spent that year trying to progress, I'd be in a much  better state than I am now.

Why did I stop drawing? Well... As most things in the world: it's complicated. Between battling depression, losing my 'muse' (I quit Mu*ing for good), my Mac dying and taking forever to get my PC set up to do art,  I lost the will to jump back on the horse. When you've got nothing to draw, no reason to draw, and no energy to draw, the floor falls out from under you and you basically even forget it's even an option. And, to myself, I'm sorry that I forgot--art was always one of the few things I always felt proud of, because it's the one skill I had in life that never came to me naturally. I had to work my butt off for it.

So, in a way, you could say that this is my New Years' resolution: belated, but worthy. Somehow, I'm going to stop being a pussy and I'm actually going to draw. I don't care what, or even how many... But I need to do it. Not only is it one of the things that makes me feel truly happy, but it could open up a lot of opportunities that I never imagined. I'll never know unless I try.

If you're curious about seeing more of my artwork and didn't figure out how from the link on the first compilation image, here's a link to my gallery on deviantART. Warning, lots of dragons. (I played on a Pern RPG and lots of people asked me to draw their shit. I didn't mind, but it stunted my variety a bit...)