Hello! I worked on a personal art study project!

About four months ago on Discord, @immadametal suggested that I should try out studying some artists that I liked, so I can understand what makes their creative works, and subsequently my own, unique. I was partially in a creative slump, so I decided to go through it as a personal art project, named The Palate Palette.

I studied eight artists on how they create their art—color choices, character design, body type/shape, line art, etc.—and create an illustration that attempts to imitate their respective styles, using two original characters I made as primary subjects. There were a few things that need improvement, but overall I think that this was worth the time spent in order to develop my artistic skills and knowledge for future works. You can find a more extensive infographic on my goals and observations here.

I like to thank The Metal again for providing me the idea to do this.

I started off 2021 with a job I found amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and worked for half a year, and questions on how to improve myself as an artist and as a person. Something personal that occurred in the late part of 2020 made me consider and focus on being kinder to myself and more open to other people, a thing that I've been struggling with for years given my work-focused ethic and solitary preference. I felt that one of the ways I could go about this is to participate in community events, and what better website to do so than one that's open to independent creators?

I didn't realize how much of an impact that decision would benefit me this year.

The Summer Festival

Sometime around May, I took note of a post in the collaborative channel of the Newgrounds Podcast Discord server--asking for artists and animators for help on an opening for a online Newgrounds convention in the last week of June--made by someone named @Stanpai. I applied and got accepted. Stanpai took note of an Iron Giant illustration/study I did back in January and gave me my primary objective: create an illustration involving P-bot and Mindchamber doing... something in a Japanese summer festival. So I did that:

Given the somewhat strict time limit that the animation project had, this was a good lesson for me in time and effort management for projects. I was able to complete my part a little earlier than when I was expecting to get it done, giving me opportunities to fine-tune it and help out a couple other project contributors, @KibbySupreme and @devoidgazer, with backgrounds, allowing them to focus on animation. The overall animation turned out excellent, creating a nice proper opening for the festival itself.

The experience working on this project was invaluable, giving me the confidence to work and improve on my animation skills (with another community event coincidentally occurring this year no less). Probably the more important thing from doing this is participating in the convention itself. There I found other creative users that I took an interest in and vice versa, and from there I eventually found myself in a group of people that I was comfortable hanging out with, even if I didn't contribute much to conversation.

The Summer Animation Jams

The Summer Festival was the first time I've learned of the ongoing Summer Animation Jams, with the round 1 entries being displayed on one night by @BrandyBuizel. Coming off a collaborative animation project, I thought this would be great opportunities to test myself as an animator since I've occasionally done only looping GIFs last year. I started participating via the side collaborative project consisting of TV bumpers to go along with the Saturday Morning-oriented round 2 entries, quickly learning how much audio gives life to an animation:

Although I did not participate in round 3, I did help @Quenek441 with 2D assets for his experimental 3D entry based on the game Money Man. His entry got 13th place!

I properly participated in rounds 4 and 5, and I've come to realize a couple things: 1) It's difficult for me to accept when an animation has acceptable quality given my standards (especially with round 4), and 2) Clip Studio Paint, the program I animate with, really doesn't like animating a lot of stuff at a given time. Because of point 2, I've had to learn the bare basics of using an editing software with DaVinci Resolve, which also lead into planning out and fitting in music and voice samples from other people I've asked for help, @xZiriusX, @LilSpook, and @immadametal. It's probably why my round 5 entry is my favorite of the bunch, as it gave me experience working with others as a project director and a video editor, a nice complement to my experience with the Summer Fest animation. It was also front-paged, so there's that!

Needless to say, this was an overall enjoyable and great learning experience as an animator. A lot of issues I've had with time and quality management were improved by participating in these, and I hope to create an animation short sometime soon (and maybe finally do something with the Music Makers pitch).

Tankmas ADVENTure

I had the great opportunity to participate in the yearly winter-themed collaborative project on Newgrounds as an illustrator. However, there was a question that made me stumble a bit in the brainstorming process: how do I make a winter-themed piece based around Newgrounds when my experience with the website is relatively limited? I haven't been actively involved on NG until late 2020, and that was only participating for small art jams.

With this in mind and a bit of confidence talk from @QueenBoo, I decided to base my drawing around these points:

• Rather than make a drawing revolving around the celebratory spirit of the holidays, I wanted to make a slightly depressing joke on working during them, something that I personally experienced with my own job.
• I wanted to make my drawing revolve around something from NG that I personally enjoyed because it'd feel more genuine to me. Sublo and Tangy Mustard was a series I discovered earlier this summer, and the nature of its setting and characters worked well with my first point.
• Instead of populating the background with well-known characters of the website, I wanted to put in original characters made by and sonas of people that I've personally collaborated with. All of the characters I've put in the drawing were from people I've mentioned previously in this post, as well as @MinaSagas's OC, a very good traditional artist who I made a drawing for her Halloween collaboration. Newgrounds has the tagline "Everything by Everyone", and I wanted to emphasize that phrase by highlighting less-known creators who have made or collaborated on neat stuff.

After a few weekends of work, my illustration debuted in-game on the 22nd. It got front-paged, a first-time occasion for me!

This year was important to me as a creator. It gave me important experience not just as an artist and animator, but as a collaborator. Working and interacting with other artists and animators has made me see others' work as their unique ways of expression and points of positive inspiration to constantly improve myself. The most important thing from this year is that I finally found a group of online friends and mutuals that I'm very comfortable sharing my work, interests, and jokes with.

A big thank-you to the people that I mentioned in this post for giving me opportunities to develop myself, as well as the people I've met during the Summer Festival for just being cool people. Here's to more personal growth this year!

I noticed an influx of new followers here coming from the recently posted Newgrounds Summer Festival intro animation. If you haven't, maybe you should check it out and follow the other contributors of it because they're really good:

I'm Blue Banana, a hobbyist digital artist that has been self-taught for at least 5 years. I also started doing animation loops last year--there isn't that much though. I like robots and androids. Nice to meet you!

Here are some original works from this year and last year that I personally like:

Apart from being here on NG, I'm also somewhat active on some other social media. Feel free to check them out below my bio, or just take a look here: https://blue-banana-art.carrd.co/

Here's to creating more art!

Hey, I'm opening up commissions again for the new year! Please check my collaboration page for the document link on my commission info and terms of service: https://www.newgrounds.com/collab/view/13155

2020’s almost over, and I’ve been doing digital art for around 4.5 years. Wow.

Despite everything in the world gradually going worse as the year went by, I’ve did a lot of things that I’m proud of. For one thing, I finally found a full-time job. While that made me feel more independent, it also dampened my art productivity, on top on a couple other discouraging stuff I dealt with the past few months. Regardless, there’s a lot of art that I’m proud to have made or made progress on.

Animations

Probably the most significant skill I’ve developed this year. I created my first digital animation in Clip Studio Paint back in April:

This is a very basic animation loop mainly to get used to animating on CSP; later on, I created more detailed loops. These are my favorites that I worked on (and coincidentally got the most attention here):

Despite the number of short loops created this year, it’s likely I won’t have the same output for next year because animations take a while to finish and I have a full-time job. Even then, animating was a nice thing to explore beyond just doing illustrations, and I hope I’ll make a short that I have in mind next year.

Background and Still Life Illustrations

I’ve done a lot more of these types of digital paintings than I expected this year! One reason may be that I've done a couple for some art contests on Newgrounds:

Another reason is that I did a fair amount of background illustrations:

And there was just stuff that I wanted to do:

I like that I’m slowly getting used to creating man-made/urban environments. I’ve always wanted to create a full illustration of a big city, and I found my chance via the Music-Inspired Art Contest a few months back. The experience I’ve gained from doing these types of illustrations is making me more confident in doing a couple ideas that I’m planning to draw out in the future.

Original Character Designs

One of my pet peeves that I have as an artist is that I always draw the same two characters over and over again, so I wanted to make more this year.

This was a character that I made back in June and was built off another OC I made for an online activity forever ago, but the animation I wanted to make with her took months to finish and was lacking a little in quality than I’d like. Nevertheless, I really like the overall design of her and felt that I was able to achieve my goal of having a clearly inspired design well enough.

This is another character design that I intend to make an animation loop about, and it’ll probably be much shorter than the above OC’s. I want to get started on it sometime in the first couple months of next year.

(I swear, I’m going to do something substantial with these two eventually.)

Other Good Things

• Although the overall quality of these hasn't improved much this year, I’ve started exploring more unique ideas and poses for character-focused illustrations. Illustrations like the three below is leading me to believe that the constant practicing in gesture and figure drawings is slowly paying off, and that I’m capable of pulling off drawings with multiple characters.

• I’ve done some commissioned art this year! Most of the substantial ones were some of the background/still life illustrations I've already linked earlier, but some of them were emotes. Here's one example I did for the Olimar Smash Discord server:

• I nearly got through studying nearly everything in anatomy via Proko’s lessons. I still tend to look back at those webpages because I haven’t put enough sheer practice in learning and memorizing these, but I feel more comfortable having a basic idea of a limb’s shape and structure rather than nothing.
• Despite working a (physically exhaustive) full-time job, I still find the time to draw stuff the past few months. Even finding at least 20-30 minutes via work breaks to get some doodles in really helps not rusting too much at drawing. Now if I only can keep it going every day…

Here’s to the new year for hopefully a better time for everyone, it’s been really rough.

(original template)

orb orb orb orb orb

it took too long to finish this

...so I made this cake that no one can actually eat. Not even me.

Hi, if you haven't heard about it on my Twitter a few weeks ago, I've recently got a new full-time job! Because of how much time this takes up during a week and how physically demanding it is, this results in a couple of things:

• I am indefinitely closing art commissions for the time being.
• Full illustrations and animations will probably be finished and uploaded at a slower rate; to compensate for this, I'm planning to post some sketches here and there in my gallery.

If you're still interested in commissioning me in the future, please feel free to message me. I'll keep it in mind when I do decide to open comms again.

working on a character sheet for another OC I draw frequently, likely going to be similar layout to this one