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Bottled fame ✨ redraw of an old art from 2014 and 2016.

Tip the artist, pretty please? | Commissions are open!

I wanted to share my journey with you all. By now you've seen a couple of pieces I've done recently.

As a kid and through college I was always the "talented" one to my art teachers. But I stopped drawing after early college and moved into building digital scenes instead. Editing what was already there. Photo manipulation, sort of, though more involved than that, since I'd take many images and combine them into one believable scene or portrait, like the Dragon Age Inquisition piece below.

So I hadn't drawn from scratch in well over a decade. When I picked up a mechanical pencil one night at work early last year, that was the start of all this. The drawing was admittedly not my best work. But I decided to put my nose to the grindstone. I wasn't new to digital art, but I was new to making everything from scratch, and new to Procreate, which was a steep climb on its own.

The first real piece I attempted was young Snape as a Death Eater. It took me two weeks, more hours than I can count, and dozens of YouTube videos, TikToks, and Insta reels just to learn a medium I'd never touched. The result was something I both loved and hated for what it cost me. Was art supposed to be this hard? It never had been with physical mediums. So why now? I got discouraged and didn't open Procreate again for a while, falling back on my composite renders instead.

Then I found SamDoesArt on Patreon and decided to start from the bottom and actually build up. I took a couple of online courses on foundations, on Procreate itself, on applying what I already knew in a new way. And you know what? It clicked. One day I didn't need a tutorial open. I didn't need to trace over a reference (to be clear, I absolutely still use references, I've just gotten much better at drawing what I see instead of tracing directly on top of it).

Now that it's clicked, I wanted to go back to that first sketch, after 15 years of not touching any physical medium at all, and see what I could do with it. The result is what you see at the top of this post.

For reference, here's the before: