Art Progress - Blog Posts

Art Log - 06/2024

It's been about 3 months of using Procreate for me!

Would have never happened if it wasn't for my good friend who's an incredibly talented graphic designer. She let me test drive Procreate on her iPad. Back in the day we bonded over being weird artsy kids in school and now we're being weird artsy adults together 🤝 Best friendship dynamic.

According to tumblr, I posetd my first digital painting on April 4th (over on my other blog). I think I made a bit of progress since then, even though I didn't make a lot of paintings in the meantime.

For every single painting I'm still making a traditional pencil sketch, upload that to Procreate and then start coloring on top of it. Not sure if I'll ever get fully confident sketching directly in Procreate.

I started liking the process and the result more around the third painting when I started using a combination of soft and hard shading with some hatching for texture. So that's the 'technique' ended up using more deliberatly for this portrait of Aziraphale.

Gotta stop drawing side profiles, that's way too many side profiles 🙈

I'll post a more detailed making-of of that portrait to document my process a bit.

The trajectory of the stats is a little concerning: 1st painting (3hrs 50min, 16 layers), 2nd painting (5hrs, 21 layers), 3rd painting (9hrs, 23 layers), 4th painting (23 hrs, 62 layers). Yeah, probabaly not a sustainable trajectory. I need to learn how to make some quicker illustrations. I tried here, but did not like the result that much.

I will forever love traditional drawing and painting, but. Digital art ... it's nice! There's no extra space needed to store paints, no brushes to clean later, fixing mistakes is easy, trying out several different color variations not a problem.

It's a goal of mine to make more complex paintings some day. It will be hard for me, I just love portrait drawing too much, it's my happy place, you see? Right now I'm working on another portrait. And then I have another planned after that. So. I'm definetly not going anywhere fast with those plans, that's for sure 😅

hate to post the same content twice but oh my good god looking at old art vs new is so funny.

4 years diff. granted I was probably 11-12 at the time of the first. SAME FUCKING CHARACTER I CANNOT

never give up your dreams guys!!! one day that freaky scrawny twink will become hot well rendered man.

First spaceship I ever made in blender vs latest spaceship I made in blender

Aaaaa this is my third year drawing this

I love seeing what changed

Hope this can inspire others to keep practicing and improving

the Codex

January 2025

November (December?) 2021

I tend to simplify things with age . . .

a quick redraw of Samuels from 2020

July 2024

October 2020

It had been left unfinished but the difference is obvious

It was the end of 2020. Man, I was not just inspired by the whole Alien thing I was obsessed with it :D love that time.

Got a couple more, planning on redrawing them as well

“Sessions” February 2024

April 2022

“What did it say, Isaac?”

I wonder what do those people who've never heard of Dead Space think of this art. Are they confused or something? I mean, there's a woman who shouts at a man in a straightjacket and she glows from the inside. A weird scene for 'em unenlightened people that's for sure 😁

Well I have improved a little! January 2024

November (or October) 2021

I've wanted to redraw this one for quite a while. Back in the days I thought the old one was a masterpiece... xD

Seeing as it’s new years eve, here’s my digital art progress!

can’t believe i’ve been doing digital art for 5 years, I’m so proud if the progress i’ve made and i’m looking forward to another year of improvement :)

More info on the pieces + closeups bellow the cut

I’m going to go through all the pieces in chronological order so first up my 2020 piece

this piece was done Dec 3(?) 2020 and took 1hr 14min.

I had been doing digital art for 4 months at this point on my phone, but i had finally gotten an i-pad and this is one of the first pieces I did with it

My 2021 piece

I did this piece Dec 27, 2021 and it took me 8hr 17min

I started improving my shading and coloring and stopped using texture brushes for everything which made my art look a lot more uniform

My 2022 piece

I did this piece Dec 30th, 2022 it took me 17hr 44min. At this point i started getting into fanart, this is a piece of Heathers (the musical) fanart and one of my first drawings of characters interacting

My 2023 piece

I did this piece Dec 1st 2023 and it took me 5hr 21 min. (the black bar on the progress chart is censoring personal info that i just now realized is on a separate layer so i removed it for the close up)

Spideypool hyperfixation was going crazy during this time lol, I actually took the time to draw a background for this one, and I (attempted) to use more color variety in highlights and shading

and finally the 2024 piece :)

I did this piece Dec 31st 2024 and it took me 2hr 36min

I’ve really improved in character design and have much better line art and coloring, I’m really happy with this piece, it’s kinda messy, i was only planning on this being a little doodle and not the piece i used for this, but it’s definitely a massive improvement and I’m happy to be getting back into digital art again

I do an art progress sheet every year because it reminds me how much i’ve improved, I highly recommend it because even when I’m unhappy with my art, I look back at my old work and am reminded of how much I’ve improved :)

Happy new year! have this Techno as a thanks for reading my ridiculously long ramble lol

old (last spring) vs new (literally today) look at that!

this is a moa egg for my mod prehistorian by the way!