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.
