The Old vs. The New

I think I basically know how everyone feels about their work when they compare the stuff they did a few years ago to the picture they just finished. It's a pretty natural feeling of awe, disgust and relief if you've improved and chances are, you have.

Posting up a new picture on DA somehow puts deviations next to the recently posted picture that are from your gallery no matter if it's in your main or in scraps and that caused a lot of distress for me XD. Suddenly I post up what I really liked and there's all this old crap from 2003 right next to YEAH SURE PEOPLE WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THAT AND WATCH ME. The concept is nice but somewhat flawed if they take from scraps too;;

But it got me back to reflecting so if you don't mind me posting up some bad crap, I'll post up nice stuff too.

Now if you'll let me gag a bit first, this is the first picture I've ever posted on DA. It's from 2003 and I drew it with a mouse on a dinky monitor (I'm seriously thinking the numbers were 800 by something). Back then I was so proud of myself of this picture that I thought it'd be good enough that people wanted to see it. Right now not so much. This thing's in storage right now and I haven't quite gotten the handle on how DA works so it's staying in storage for now.

Stuff from the next few years wasn't as great as I thought as it would be now but I must have felt proud of myself. I would never allow myself to delete images. Hide them away when DA's being stupid yes, but getting rid of your past doesn't allow you to show through to your future's progress. Plus it's always funny to see how wonked out I thought anatomy was back then. I swear to god when I see my old pencil drawings the shoulder was a tumor-esque thing.

It also lets me see how I've been influenced. Needless to say it's anime, anime, anime, JTHM, Invader Zim to an extent, more anime. It wasn't until I broke out of doing fan characters for ever series I could get my hands on that I actually could do something that wasn't just mimicking a style. I took everything I learned (and stole) and made it into something solid. Well. Solidish.

This is the first OC that I had after my tossing of Fan characters. (You guys should probably know that my username was the name of my Naruto Fancharacter. I never posted pictures of her on DA and now I feel so relieved about it. I also feel relieved that I never tried to paint over anime screenshots or manga panels to draw them out. That always seemed stupid to me no matter what age.) I was a bit of a stupid kid even by this time (2007) but I wasn't a bad kid so no harm was made here. It had some semblance of anatomy (it wasn't until forever later did I realize that heads weren't supposed to be that big. I'm pretty sure that I'm still struggling with it now.) I just figured I'd toss in everything I enjoyed about the Internet in one picture and make a character out of it. That appeared as this 4chan amalgamation of fish and tacky colours.

From then on, there've been several attempts at further designing more interesting characters, I've quickly learned that Mary Sues = no no and that I had a penchant for details. So many details. I let myself attempt to learn deadlines by joining OCTs and I'm pretty glad to say that I've never gone past a deadline. I'm a bit so so on the quality of the pages I dished out but they seem to be liked nevertheless. I've posted out sketchdumps only in the past year or so and they're a pretty good sampling of progress within months. I've worked on bigger and bigger canvases and I'm pretty sure that if the little me could see what I can do now, I'd be in awe. And then ask for piggy back rides.

Also here's something nice. I did promise you that.