deviantart

As 2023 starts to roll around, I’ve done lots of self-reflection on myself. A lot of it has to do at a milestone point of my life, the winter of 2016. A lot of good and bad things happened that year; and while there was that swirling torrent of negative things that were going on, there were a few bright lights that made me look ahead and see something beyond that.

Mostly I looked at how my life could’ve gone different, and actually did have a ton of regrets with a lot of things. But, I found myself still coming back and thinking about those few positives that happened in that season.

Why am I mentioning this seven years later?

I think that’s exactly it; just time passing by, and still trying to sort out where I want to go in the future. And then you look back at happened, remember some things and wonder what’s going to happen to all of that. Moreso, what’s happening to all the things in my head that I don’t share with people.

To just preface, I don’t go around and say “I’m going to make this for people online to see!” I do keep quite a lot of things to myself, either for my own enjoyment or to share in person. But when 7+ years go by and you’ve not shared these things with a single soul, I do step back and wonder if there’s any value of those experiences to put in the public space. A lot of the time they do get censored and filtered to leave the interesting bits, protect privacy, etc.

I think that cycle does have to do with me aging and reflecting, for sure. Maybe that’s musings for another day; but today, I’m here to actually share something from that databank of memories.

Your late Christmas 2022 present is what my space was, several tunes and some munchies from the period.

This is also the first time I’m doing “read this blog entry to these tunes”. I listened to this on loop a few times while writing most of it, with some other stuff later in the actual post when that got repetitive. So feel free to have this play in the background as you read.

Consider this my holiday gift to you for 2022.

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I’ve been drawing for quite a long time. I sadly can’t say I’ve been drawing for most of my entire life, but it’s safe to say I’ve been drawing for 1/3rd if not more of it.

As described in my previous story about deviantART, my art skills didn’t really take off until I had access to the platform. A couple of years before that I had taken a short three-week special course at Walters State in a summer drawing class. That helped up my skills a whole bunch over my pre-teen drawings. It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible, either.

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When I started to get my feet wet on the Internet, not all of it went well. Quite the opposite. I was quite a newb, and my homeschooling background coupled with strict parents didn’t help. Then add that I wasn’t on it enough to get the hang of things. It was a very bad combination.

I talked to very few people online. But there was one person I was in correspondence with that I had met over an Atlantis fanfic. As time went on they introduced me to a site by the name of deviantART. I signed up in 2004 after hearing them mention they were on it, and slowly started to delve into what it had to offer. I do remember I had posted a few things but because of my social ineptness mixed with poor drawing skills, pieces were lackluster at best. I didn’t even have a proper scanner at the time.

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A few years ago, online dA buddy Skylanth was complaining how people would ask if she drew things while in public. “OMG did you draw that?!” they would exclaim. This began a repetitive question and she lost her patience in a journal one day:

 

“You know what? No, I ddn’t draw it. A man with a tuba on his head appeared, gave me this sketchbook and told me to PRETEND.”

 

That stuck in my head for a few years since I read it, but I was worried that I wouldn’t give it justice if I drew it out. I finally decided to just get it down as 3 years had passed since the idea was mentioned. Better late than never, I suppose.

 

In case you’re confused with this mysterious tuba-donning stranger, the face he’s making is the duckface. Just to help clarify things.

 

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I find that nowadays I get home, I just want to veg out a little bit and do something else than either be in the house or napping. I do get tired, but until I hammer out a better schedule, I hop outside just as it starts to cool down just a little. And since this is the end of August, it’s thankfully not sweltering hot when out here.

 

So often I have a soda, taking my saucer chair and lounging on the back porch with my Iconia A100 tablet, browsing deviantART or Houzz  (as you can see here). It is a little clunky but the Houzz app works beautifully, and it’s like browsing virtual housing without leaving your couch.

 

Time will tell when I finally start doing something in the evenings.

 

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This fantastic piece was originally a sketch done by awesome dA artist MGilhang; took a few months for it to get done, but it was worth the wait. By then I had gotten a whole lot better with Photoshop in terms of coloring, so when I took to this piece it had a different level of quality over the pieces I’d usually do.

 

I couldn’t have asked for a better, sexier version of Britney from anyone, and don’t think anyone would be matching up to that for awhile. This is exactly how I saw her in my head and am thankful to see someone do her justice.

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This was a real interesting piece to say the least. I met this girl by the name of Aitia online, who listened to my idea of a lineart collab. She took my idea of drawing James Bond and Sheena Fujiayabashi together, then let me color the piece! This has been in production since August of 2010, so I’m glad to finally get it done.

 

It was one of my first big pieces I had spent time to color properly with new methods such as multiply and layers, and I even got to use my brother’s Mac at the time to work on it to finish (it even worked wonderfully with my tablet!)

 

I’m less than impressed with the background, but I can always visit this piece in the future and give it a facelift when my skills get better, right?

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