A Rusty Artist's Chronicles

Hi! I'm Andy and I really like art, but in the past few years I haven't been able to draw much since I'm in college and school + life in general has been rough. I thought I'd make a little account to chronicle my progress as I try to pick it back up, since I used to be pretty good at both traditional and digital. My digital skills have atrophied the most, but hopefully by working on it and putting it out there for critique and advice I can regain and improve my art skills across the board.

Blah blah blah, proper name, place name, backstory stuff

I've been drawing and doing art my whole life, from drawing to writing to music. When I was in jr high-early high school I used to have a lot of accounts on art sharing sites and I participated in events like art fight, inktober, mermay, DTIYS, design trades and more, and recently I saw someone post about art fight and it made me realize how much I missed drawing. So, I picked up my iPad and started drawing... And I was horrible 😭. It's like I never drew in the first place. So, on to watching tutorial after tutorial for how to use procreate and other digital programs and it's slowly coming back. I'm excited because when I was a preteen, I was great at using digital art and knowing all the layer effects and tools, but I was pretty mediocre at drawing. Like it was fine, I was 10-15 it's allowed to be cringe lol, but now I'm hoping since I'm older and have had a lot more practice with drawing and fundamentals I can bring that into digital art once I relearn how to use the medium. I'm hoping to be able to start being apart of a community again, and meet a bunch of cool people while having somewhere to post my progress and get feedback from it. Along with just practicing basics, I want to revisit some of my old art and try to improve on it to have a very clear comparison (Lord knows my old OCs need some reworks 😭). So hopefully you'll stick around and we can be cool art buddies or whatever. Thanks for reading!

Definitely an improvement and a pretty decent job for my first procreate project. I thought a super basic lineart style would be best suited for me as I worked out how to use procreate and tried to remember how to do digital art lol. I also did a more close up view, since my focus was on remembering how to shade and color and not the actual design. I’m also just now realizing her whole arm is robotic and not just the elbow down dang it 😭 It’s not really the art style I want to go for, but starting here instead of a super complicated piece with crazy coloring worked well. Especially since I had to watch a LOT of tutorials to figure out how to do shading and lighting (at one point in time believe it or not, I did actually know how to utilize layers and blend modes) but eventually we got there. I think there’s a lot more life in this piece than before, and I like the colors MUCH better now. I forgot how overwhelming it is to pick colors when you literally have all the options lol, so the plan is to do some more color studies and watch some coloring tips YouTube videos to best take advantage of the options. Any advice and critique is much appreciated as I dust off the cobwebs for this medium, especially if it’s how to paint glass because I almost crashed out over her goggles lol. Or clothes. I also didn’t know what to do with her little jumpsuit. Hopefully soon I can also post some traditional art to show the true scope of my actual drawing skills too. I’m much better with some paper and a pen. I am very excited to be able and implement color more than I do traditionally though, (If I do any, it’s usually watercolor) and want my true digital “style” to be a lot more saturated. Again, any tips are super duper appreciated!

Here’s the reference/old art.