Your development over time

[Mikan]

How about a development thread on how we've progressed over time?

1998: I had been drawing for about a year at this point:


Half a year later (1999):


Moved to the US (2000):


The following year (2001):

I bought tones through a friend back home and tried to create something for a magazine I used to read in Korea,
but in the end I never finished the comic nor sent it in for review.

I drew this comic for a small local anime convention (2002 March):

I didn't sell very many books.. heh.
It had less than 100 participants, so I wasn't surprised.

I began to draw more for my webcomic than for contests (2002 August):

It is probably the longest project I worked on seriously to this day.

Entry for the 2003 Tokyopop contest:


Entry for the later 2003 Tokyopop contest:

(I didn't mail it in the end.)

Entry for the 2004 tokyopop contest:


Tokyopop entry for the 2005 contest:


2006:

I stopped drawing comics after this year. I blame MMOs.
Even after I quit playing MMOs, I haven't been drawing comics.

2007:

Nowadays I mostly doodle on different drawing boards.

2008:

Or use photoshop to draw.

Last week:



Feel free to post your own progress! It's okay even if it's really short.

[yummy]

Waouh that's a nice art development you have there. It's incredible how your narration changed too.

[LVUER]

Nice development. It can be clearly seen that your drawing definitely improving. And I think your development is the best at around 2006 onwards (2006 to 2007 is the best I think, I mean the biggest improvement).

[Mikan]

Nice development. It can be clearly seen that your drawing definitely improving. And I think your development is the best at around 2006 onwards (2006 to 2007 is the best I think, I mean the biggest improvement).

Maybe... I think it's just the colors that make the drawing better though.
I did draw and color things before 2006: http://skimlines.deviantart.com/art/Cov ... k-25621955 (2005)
I think my biggest "hop" was 2000 to 2001.. I could finally draw a few okay-looking drawings by then lol. (no more cheek-nose and going-off-the-face-eyeballs)

[Jake]

Hmm. My development has been a lot more scattershot, 'cause I'll freqently get bored of one thing and go off and develop something else for a while. So there were a couple of years where I didn't really do much drawing but got a lot better at building model kits, for example.

2001
I'll start with late 2001, 'cause... well, that's the earliest piece I could dig out. Probably about when I started drawing semi-regularly, as well, conveniently.

I had this thing for inking at the time, I seem to recall I did this one with a brush-pen. Which is kind of nice, but I was never really happy with the lines, which were always too thick for my tastes.


2002
By early 2002, I'd moved on to Painter. Probably '5' or 'Classic', I forget which. Still totally failing at decent proportions half the time.


2003
Early 2003 I had a brief go at drawing a comic, all blue pencils and dip pens and doing stuff properly, damnit (left). Mid 2003 I decided it was all too much effort and packed it in, but not before using a couple of the same characters in a 24-hour-comics challenge (right) which was more like a 8-or-9-hour-comics challenge with lots of sleeping and a bit of going to work.


Later in 2003 a few friends from university decided it would be fun to make one of these "ren'ai" games they'd been hearing about. At which point I thought "hey, cool, it's like that choose-your-own-adventure/Lone-Wolf-gamebook-on-the-PC thing I was thinking about a little while ago, only it makes more sense this way around" and agreed to do backgrounds for them.


2004
Hmm... I think this was the year I took off in favour of model-building or something. I did a fair number of traditional-media paintings around this time, though (e.g. this one of one of my mother's dogs) and picked up an old interest in figure sculpting. And started playing around with Photoshop instead of sticking to Painter all the time.


2005
In 2005, I started drawing Precession once a week, which has probably been the most useful thing for my development (left). Also developed an unhealthy obsession admiration for Blame!'s Sanakan (right) and continued with the sculpting.



2006
More Precession, of course; also started doing larger colour versions of some of the single-character panels, like the second image here. Painter, playing around with blending and colour choices and so on. Still not very good at it two years later, but hey.



Also started using Photoshop for more colour stuff - the tank-girl on the left below is an example of such. All finger-smudge-tool pushing colours around the blend the shading and highlighting in, from what I recall.
The other thing that happened in 2006 was that I came across this "Ren'Py" thing, so I started playing around with character sprites all of a sudden...



2007

By 2007 I'd got pretty comfortable with Precession, so every now and again I'd turn out pages I'm still fairly happy with like the ones below. (The problem with Precession as a metric of how my drawing's improved is that I'll do pages on Sunday and Monday evenings, most weeks, so half the time how well they turn out is as much a function of what mood I'm in as anything...



Random-drawing-of-Precession-Characters turned into random-drawing-of-Precession-character-sprites, which I then stopped again later as I figured it was better to roll the better of the alternate storylines into the comic's plot. Also, near the end of the year I started doing a lot of DP9-inspired art; these two (right) are a pair of characters from a play-by-post Heavy Gear game some guys were running.



2008

The main thing I did this year was move Precession to full-colour. I'd originally started it so I could get regular drawing practice once a week, and it was getting to the point where I needed colouring practice more than I needed practice with the shapes and proportions and everything. And I still do. :/



Also... you know, all the art for Star Story Saga: Renaissance, which was our NaNoRenO entry this year.

Most recently? Well, I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be sharing the art for the project I'm working on right now, but here's last week's Precession page, which turned out fairly well.

[sake-bento]

2000 - My first comic ever.

This was my first comic in all of ever. It was a magical girl series. Very creative, I know...

2002-2003 - Short-lived story that was terribly generic.

I then moved on to fantasy, which was cool, but I made the mistake of limiting myself to a 4-panel format which made things a little hard on me.

2004-2006 - Another comic that died due to...a lot of things.

This is only a couple years old, and I'm actually still happy with the story.

2007 - My current comic.

My current series.

[Sakurazaki]

Be ready for some awful stuff. D: And image heavy
edit: linked some stuff

I don't dabble in comics/manga very much, since I do mainly illlus work and chara design.

early 2005


To my first attempt at a page in late 2005...someone asked if I wanted to do illustration work on it And it sucks XD


Took a break in 2006...then started back up in 2007 ...I was really influenced by Sugisaki's style. I got serious about drawing at this point

2007 my style really evolved and changed drastically.

Early 2007 ...I think in Feb?


March 2007


Somehow things ended up like this in Dec 2007...my style devolved if you know what I mean...I got too influenced by other styles....



2008-The year I got a tablet XD

Jan 2008-Side veiws are getting more developed and I tend to like to use them...


but by May-June they end up like this usually:


Tablet work started in April...and mostly tablet work from then till now at that time I was influenced by Ito's style...with the big cute eyes. I ended up CGing/toning them that way too.



And then finally to where I am....stuck somewhat in Sugisaki-Ito style yet results are always random....it seems my style isn't solid yet D:





I'm not even going to touch on my CG style...D: Too many changes I made. Basically I went from crappy airbrush, to soft cel shade, to painting/cell shade/airbrush.

[Deji]

(warning: tl;dr with links but no images)
2011 edit: Most links don't work anymore after a massive cleanup I made a couple of years ago...

Unlike many "anime artists" that start drawing when they start watching their first anime series, I started drawing at the age of 4.... not much improve for heving been drawing for 20 years, thou ^^; I blame my family, my lame art classes in school and the lack of internet until I was 18.

Sadly I don't have anything from before 1996... I probably destroyed everything from back then. I tend to hate my drawings that are older than... I don't know, three months? So when I was in school, I'd go through my doodled notebooks and sketchbooks, shred to pieces or throw into the garbage everything I didn't like, give away some of them and keep the ones I likd most... that were probably discarded the year after.

I'm lazy to find my dvds with old stuff and to scan my old sketchbooks, so here it is the compilation of drawings I made in 2006 for deviantART "quest for improvement"

Now for what's going on there...

I had a computer in 1996 and I'd use Paint to draw, but I liked drawing by hand the most. Of course my proportions were awful and every time I tried to make a comic/manga page, I failed horriby (I still do). I avoided backgrounds at any cost, so most my drawings were characters or chibis just standing there.
My "style" was a mixture of Masami Kurumada's Saint Seiya, Naoko Takeuchi's Sailor Moon and CLAMP's RG Veda (random: the male main character in RG Veda is bassed off from a character from Saint Seiya).

By 1998, Nobuhiro Watsuki's Rurouni Kenshin was added to the mixture, along with some Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2 and some Samurai Shodown stuff.

Then I got internet access in 2001! And started oekaki-ing at a Digimon board. I was into digimon 02 at that time because along with the internet connection I got cable tv and access to more anime that the few series on national tv. Before oekaki, I barely made any digital coloring attempts... I'd just scan my hand-drawn pictures and add some Photoshop filters.
My "style" was then all digimon, since I believed in drawing fanart in the most similar style possible to the original... and then it was mixed with DiGi Charat.... ugh.... My nickname comes from that time, actually.

By the end of 2002, my mom got me my first tablet from a trip to Europe (we doidn't have tablets here back then), so oekaki-ing and coloring my hand-inked pictures was alot easier! Problem was that my tablet decided to hate oekaki boards shortly after, so I stopped oekaki-ing to focus on Photoshop.

By 2003 I joined deviantART and I was actively playing Ragnarok Online. Now I had many sources of inspiration, and I'd try to imitate some coloring styles of the images I liked the most.

In 2004 I joined my current boyfriend, who is pretty into anime (more than my older ones) and into videogames, specially MMOs and RPGs. That made me play RO even more and draw less. I had several sketchbooks with unfinished ugly doodles of my RO characters... but whenever I drew something, I tried to make it more int6eresting than just my "character standing there with generic bg"... even if they were RO characters only.

In 2005 I entered the Illustration career... so I pretty much stopped drawing things from myself as often as I used to, but got to know more techniques and non-anime artist. I also pretty much dropped the MMOs and started taking commissions. The same year I got heavily influeced again in my style, since i got into Hiromu Arakawa's Fullmetal Alchemist and, following my belief of drawing fanart on the same style of the author's, I copied Arakawa's style the best I could and then I couldn't go back to my old style anymore. I became "known" in deviantART at that point due the fanarts and became conscious of pageviews and such >_o.

I still kept practicing more interesting ways of coloring, tried other styles and started drawing my original characters more often as well. I also picked up the traditional media again, as I was forced to do so due my classes.
... and my comic/manga pages done for assignments were horrible...
My first attempt, using pen nib and real screentones
Second attempt, using pen nib and brush

In 2006 I applied as a colorist for Mystery Parfait's Flight of Twilight, since my boyfriend made me addicted to VN CGs and I wanted to make something like that.
My application, after recoloring it around 4 times to play diff styles

That year I also got myself a set of COPIC markers... sadly the colors I used most dried fast, since I used them for my assigmnents.
An assignment for Illustration Workshop class

At the end of 2006 and starting 2007, I decided I wanted to improve on my comic-manga making skills, , so I made a character for enterVOID:
My style had changed again a bit at that point, influenced by the character designs from BONES' Eureka Seven.
While my introductory pages were... nice, my first battle i was awful, due lack of experience and bad time management.
My first battle: Vinca vs. Itami
Next battles were an improvement (you can check them at the site), but again my bad time management skills played against me.

In 2007 I... pretty much kept trying different ways of coloring things and working more in my anatomy. I started being less afraid of backgrounds as well, but still avoiding them as much as I could. I started procrastinating more on collge and general things as well ^^; I got to have a good practice with assignments and commissions, thou.
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Isht ... l-54281200
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Vinc ... e-60396025
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Vinc ... g-67633628
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/nigh ... g-71938896

During the last period of 2007 and during all my summer vacations (January-March), my life was consumed by my Diploma college project... or whatever you call it in english, this being Astre@.
With the knowledge I got from helping making sprites for Flight of Twilight, I had much fun playing with theones for Astre@. I was also forced to make backgrounds and event CGs with backgrounds, improving background-making skills dramatically!
Background for Astre@

Now I found a new way of coloring and I'm having fun with it, while working on a project for my Comic Workshop 2 class. I'm also having fun drawing not-so-complicated backgrounds.
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Alic ... 0-85526891
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Isht ... p-89383353

Sadly, my traditional art skills got awfully rusty with the lack of practice.
http://dejichan.deviantart.com/art/Kimo ... 2-89594922

And that's it >__o

[Vatina]

Wow, it's fun and interesting to look at this thread and your pictures You've all improved so much!

Reading it made me dive into the old stacks of drawings I have, looking at my feeble first attempts at comic making. I once thought that I didn't stand much of a chance of becoming a comic artist, because I never spend very much time at things like that in my life. But recently I have discovered that I am very much wrong at that point :S Guess I have been drawing comics since I was a kid and did my very own Calvin and Hobbes look-a-like.

Anyway, it leads back many years before I discovered anime. This is what I used to draw like: (super-long post coming up)

Year: ???? (= ages ago)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... side13.jpg - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... _side3.jpg
What is this!?! It's Pizza Pony on the first page! The very first action hero I ever made. He was super cool, and even had his own portable pizza-shack - how much more awesome can you get? xD
The other page is from a different comic about horsies. This "Quest of Improvement" post on DA is actually very relevant here: Linku
Both of these comics have even older and messier versions, but I won't show them here Too bad I don't know the exact year....

My comics rarely involved humans until I discovered manga and found a style I felt more comfortable with in that regard. There are a few attempts leading up to this, but none of them made it past the sketching stage, so I'm fast-forwarding to:

2004
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... age9-1.jpg
This is when I began drawing the Angelic Orbs comic. Lol.....
I made a single attempt at inking pages during this time with no luck at all.

2005 (I think?)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... 17_m-1.jpg
With part two I started inking and colouring the comic. Don't try to read it, it's lame

When that was over, I also decided to redo the first part to make it match the 2nd:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... 5_mm-1.jpg

2006
Time to try something new - always wanted to do a short comic based on another work. Still used markers to colour pages.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... ide6_m.jpg - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... de17_m.jpg


2007
But of course the evil circle continues as I decide to redo part 2 as well I guess it's not a wonder that it feels like I have been drawing the same thing all the time. This is also the year where I decided to switch to computer shading, since I was running out of copic markers, and it was a lot of hard work to clean the pages @_@
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... e2_m-1.jpg - http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... 23_m-1.jpg
(the last one look familiar?)

To break out of this routine I did some other stuff this year, like taking part in the contest and all that:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... 15_m-1.jpg


and....

2008

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v194/ ... side15.jpg - http://www.vatinasportal.dk/images/stor ... elienn.jpg
A page I just finished inking today, and some recent colour work


I can't show you much else, since most of the work I have done this year are for my game - and I want to save that for later

In general 2007 has been my most productive year so far I think. I uploaded a total of 3 finished comics to my site during 2007 (although one was drawn in 06), and did a lot of work on both the AO comic and game as well. Phew, I hope I can live up to that this year as well....

Edit: ouch, sorry about the huge pictures >_< I should have resized them some more.
Edit2: Changed the images to links now.

[Sin]

My post was moved to Let's hentai hentai due to well.. hentai.

[magi]

I think I actually got worse at some point. O.o;;

[Saori]

Haha, I have one comparison image somewhere. Let me dig it up xD



Ah, yes. MS Paint. Good times, good times <3


magi: 2002 Threads of Fate image! Haha, I love that game.

[Shippokren]

Looks fun indeed. Some Pictures are not shown because of size.

Late2002-
It started when I was 8-9 when I started to draw serious. It was actually this that made me get it, my own paper keyblade thing... poor tree never had a chance.
Paper keyblade XD- http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b300/ ... 0_1514.jpg

Mid2003-
Started to draw doodles on paper and I was pretty good for a starter but to bad this was really the best I could do with a pencil and paper.
Riku and Keyblade- http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b300/ ... Haggar.jpg
CopyPicture Of Naruto- http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b300/ ... 0_1587.jpg

Early2004-
Get interested in the internet . Start My first paint doodle. Roger From SO3 X3.



Early2005-
If any of you played Hack//Chat I made some sprites on there... sadly all unfinished. ^^; Also some Pokemon fun.
Rikku from FFX

Flannery From Pokemon-


Mid2005-2006-
My adventures with Pixia for a few years.
Hinata-

Star Ocean 3 The fairy and cliff-


Early2007-
I start to get better at drawing with paint and forget beloved Pixia for awhile.
Ne-Ko Beginning Look-

HackGU Haseo choice-


Late2007-
I find out Gimp!(Sadly only made one picture from it thought.)
Sea and sand... weee...-


Early2008-
I find out about Paint.Net and my first doodle is created follow with my project Beast Wars!
http://psychokeiichi.deviantart.com/art ... p-76245816


Mid2008 and Now-
Sadly I have not been doing this for long so The start of a genius drawer is still going up very slowly.

[N0UGHTS]

I love seeing how skill in any ability has progressed...

On another note: Woah. Blonde Lucy. Not sure it'd go as well with the Elfen Lied OP color scheme, but interesting anyway.

I'll post my stuff once I can afford a new scanner. Dangit...

[K.Taro]

I don't draw that much the last few years but you might see an improvement. Before 2006 only 3 or 4 horrible sketches. And I never touched colours a long time.

2006


2007


2008



And now there are colours. But it's not an improvement. XD



You see there is still a lot of work to do.