nondesignated:

Ch-ch-ch-changes.

(Click the images for dates/age)

I’m still home for the holidays and I’ve been going through some old stuff.

I used to be a cartoon-watching, Disney-obsessed, Lara-fixated little boy who would copy paused screens and trace sticker books all the time just for fun. Those are the Biker Mice from Mars that you see, yes. And Sailor Moon and the characters from Toy Story and my god, was I obsessed with the Little Mermaid.

I was the kid who had just started taking drawing more seriously after a few years of barely any actual drawing and a lot of learning Photoshop and doing “graphics”. Time well-spent, I say - nowadays, I’m not sure I would have the patience to learn new software. Got my first tablet which, to this day, it’s the one I used and love - and, as you see, my early colours are hardly like what I do today. At this point, deviantArt played a huge part on what I saw, did and liked.

At some point, I clearly believed legs should make up 3/4 of a person. The animu was strong within me, then. I paid no attention to line quality and somehow thought pencil rendering made my stuff look better. To be young and naive. To my younger self’s credit, I did the bulk of my anatomy studying at this point.

I went into art school with the dream of being a video game concept designer and left knowing I want to be an illustrator. Random head shots, impossible outfits and standing poses no longer did it for me - I’m still interested in that line of work, though my interests shifted a bit. Comics became relevant again. So did storytelling.

I have no idea how much my work is going to change in the future, but that doesn’t faze me - not anymore. In fact, I’ll be worried if it looks exactly the same, because if I’m not evolving, I’m probably not having fun. And if I’m not having some measure of fun, I don’t know why I’d choose this line of work in the first place, because it surely isn’t for the money.

So when you’re feeling a bit unsure about how your work looks or the way you do things, when you don’t know what the next step should be, I say you should just relax. Remember that it was fun. It is fun, or at least it should be. A bit of pressure can help you, but a lot can break you. So once in a while it’s okay to give yourself a pat in the back and think “that’s pretty impressive”. And do it for yourself, because honestly I don’t know why you’d do it for anyone else.

So, have you looked at your old drawings lately?