3: Walking Your Path

All children are artists. At some point, many stop making art because of their inner critic, the voice that tells you you can’t do something based on arbitrary statements. It’s a shame because the more art we make, the better the world becomes. Before picking up the pencil again, I, myself, stopped making art. I spent the majority of my childhood creating pieces and making comic books. In college, I stopped, a combination of the inner critic and not having enough time. Plus, at the time, I wanted to purse a more music and writing rich career path. However, fifteen years later, I returned to visual art with an iPad and Apple Pencil.

I think it’s important to look at my trajectory as an artist and compare my current work to my previous. Too often, we compare ourselves to others, knowing nothing of their journeys, only their results. However, if we look at our own path, we can see personal growth in a better light. For me, there are three specific pieces that I’ve done in recent years that I think conceptualize and solidify my greatest moments of growth in art and I wanted to share those with you.

I first wanted to show three of my previous pieces from when I was a kid. The first is a poster I drew for a novel series I wrote. I was heavily influenced by Final Fantasy, Ultima, Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons and Dragons, which shows in the world of 15 year old Squid. Anatomy was not my strong suit, perspective needed work, but I was 15 and ambitious. The second drawing is Frog from Chrono Trigger. It was my Senior art project and, while reference was used, my ability to shade, light, and color had improved greatly. I’m still exceptionally proud of this drawing. The third is my character from Asheron’s Call, Emeraldwind. This draw was virtually all from imagination, as the game could not produce realistic art and the character, armor, and more did not come from any realistic reference images. I had also started doing a more “anime” style of drawing, with simpler facial features.

These three drawing show growth in fundamentally different ways. That’s important because, while there are specific points I want to reach with my art, it will not always look the same: there may be cel-shaded art and there may be semi-realism; there may be more painterly style and airbrushed styles; there may be line art and there may be lineless art. Your art changes as you do and those changes also match your tastes. That will be something of note in looking at my next three pieces.

After I started making art again, I struggled with a number of concepts before I finally hit my first massive growth spurt. That growth spurt was this piece: Fly Me to the Moon. This piece was a show of dynamic posing, better line work, and mixing all of the things I had learned up to that point in Procreate together. While there are improvements I can suggest for this piece, I think it’s important to realize that this piece broadened my ability to create fun poses from multiple reference photos, including my own.

The second drawing I want to showcase is this one: Windblown Girl. Shortly before this, I was using purple and orange to do my shading and lighting. I wanted to have a more organic drawing and spent a lot of time looking at artists like Dave Greco and Laura Braga for inspiration. I realized that I needed to change how I rendered my drawings to elevate them to the next level. Windblown Girl was that drawing and between softer shadow edges and better highlights, I nailed the look I wanted. In my opinion, this is one of the strongest examples of growth I’ve ever had in my portfolio.

The last drawing is a recent drawing: Purah from Tears of the Kingdom. This is markedly different than the previous two. Recently, I’ve found that I love creating cel-shaded art. It happened out of necessity, to be honest, because making a bi-weekly comic book page means you have to be fast at what you do. Cel-shading is the way to do it. Because of that, I’ve found that I love doing more cel-shaded work overall, with a little bit of airbrushing along for the ride. But the growth I experienced with this drawing was my line technique, my coloring, and my anatomy. Even years later, I’m refining things about my process to make things easier for myself during the process. Each step along the way has led up to this and beyond. I couldn’t be happier.

I think we need to quiet the voice when it tells us things that aren’t conducive to our growth. When it says to give up, we need to look at and analyze what it’s really trying to say: “You should do some anatomy studies” or “You should refine how you color your picture” or even “You should have a friend look at your pieces and make some suggestions on improvements.” Being able to review our own work to see the path we’ve walked and comparing our current art with our previous helps immensely in creating future art that makes us happy. Because, at the end of the day, we want to be happy with ourselves and our art. Being able to see improvement definitely helps with that.

Thanks for reading, my Squids. Now go out there and create.