artist

Today is the one year anniversary of my WordPress blog.

I’m not satisfied with the past year, but I am satisfied with the past couple months. The past year, I’ve had a lot of trouble with drawing, I’ve questioned myself as an artist, whether I should continue drawing, or just go back to writing.

On October 15, 2016, I decided to commit myself to drawing. Now, don’t think this meant that all of my troubles suddenly lifted, and that everything became clear. It didn’t. I still had the same problems I always had, and still struggled. All this meant was that, no matter the struggle, I’d work to be an artist.

No, it wasn’t until about December 2016 that I really started hammering down. I started going through the drawabox lessons harder, and started to really try.

And, with that, I’ve been happy with my progress.

Let’s look at drawings from one year ago, and drawings from recently…

The first is a post titled Left Hand Sketch from March 16, 2016. Close enough, right?

It’s… legible. You can tell it’s a hand, though not a very good one. It was fun to make, alright? I was still in High School at the time, and I drew this on my notes. I was taking one of those after school credit-makeup classes, because I was a naughty student who didn’t try his darnedest in Physics!

Funny story about that, actually. At the time, in my High School, the counselors were absolutely useless, didn’t help anybody with anything. In my Senior year (Year 12), I was supposed to get Photography class. You know what they gave me? Physics. Yeah, it’s a little different! They refused to switch me, so I flunked out of Physics, because fuck ’em. And so I got this after-school Family Health class to make up the half-credit, a class where I doodled in my notes and browsed PetaPixel all day, tee-hee. But hey, I passed, so whatever!

The other drawing is an ogre from the game Destiny. It was based off a piece of concept art. There’s no construction, and the shading is pretty bad. The anatomy isn’t bad, but it’s just a relatively poor drawing.

Now, something more recent..

As you can tell, I figured out what form was, and how to construct things! I owe almost everything to drawabox, for all the lessons and guidance given. These two pieces were actually lessons from that site, I encourage everyone to check it out! Great site if you want to learn how to draw, there’s lessons, exercises, homework, it’s all there!

Now it’s time to talk about my blogging goals for the next year..

My goal for the next year is to make this blog much more active. I know, I know, every blogger on the face of this planet says that with their dying blog, but I mean it! I think!

I want to post more than just art stuff here. This should be my space. The entire point of this blog was to show the mind of an artist (I’m not an artist, I’m a student of art, but whatever). This blog wasn’t supposed to be some wall to post pictures, it was supposed to be a space where people could see what it’s like for a creative person to try and grow (sounds pretentious, whoops).

And so, that’s my goal. This next year, I want to make this blog more dynamic. I already have a category called Gaming open, which I plan to post on. And I also am going to open up a section called Con’s Corner, where I talk about whatever the hell I want, it’ll probably be political a lot of the time, so be warned.

As for personal, artistic goals. Firstly, I want to start drawing the human form this year, and get really good at it! That’s been my goal as an artist for a long, long time now, and I want to do it!

Secondly, I’d like to start some webcomics. Nothing super fancy, but I always get these ideas for funny little webcomics, so I want to try my hand at that this year!

Another, more pressing goal is that I want to complete my drawabox lessons by next February. That’s a lot, but I think I can do it!

And that’s that, my look back. I’m excited for the next year, and can’t wait to see where this blog goes. I’m excited to see this blog grow, and hopefully reach some new heights in the next 365 days.

So, I finally started my animal studies on drawabox.com and this was the first bear that I drew. Yikes.

Now, I know it’s bad, yeah? Honestly, I got kind of pissy after drawing this. Even though this is probably better than anything I could’ve drawn a few months ago, I was still mad.

So, after a bit of pacing and fuming, I came back, and tried again.

SO MUCH BETTER. Right? The anatomy is significantly better, and it looks much better than the last.

That’s art; practice and practice and practice. I remember one of my favorite artists, Noah Bradley, saying that failure is not being unsuccessful, or not making it where you wanted. No, failure is doing nothing.

If you’re bad at drawing, like me, stop giving a shit. Draw anyway. Every single artist started where you did, and you’re gonna have to work your ass off. So, enjoy the trip, work hard, and don’t fail; don’t do nothing.