artifacts of a misspent life

just about everybody seems to be doing these old art posts, and while at first i was hesitant to join in, i guess i might as well join in the humiliation. they're just drawings. and at one point i thought they all looked good. in a few more years i'll probably hate everything i'm doing now, heh.

going back as far as i can manage. in first through fourth grade we had to keep little journals to practice writing in. i didn't like writing much, but my teacher let me get away with just writing a few words then filling up the page with illustrations sometimes. looking back, i have a new found respect for teachers because if a kid handed me this stuff, i'd have no idea what to make of it. it also makes me wonder...people had been telling me i had a talent for drawing since kindergarten, but how were they sure of this? is this considered good art for a 7-year-old? how can people tell one kid can draw better than another? it all looks the same to me. i also like that i didn't figure in any of the other prominent features of the ice cream truck, but i remembered the gas tank, right in the middle of the side of the truck, where it should be.


most of my later elementary school-middle school art is lost because it was before i had a scanner, and most of it was in notebooks i'm not sure what happened to. the early stuff was pretty bland, a comic about stick people, and a series about talking dogs (i was pretty much only into drawing animals as a kid). later i worked on an epic comic called the Crown about a princess with a sentient crown that protected her and gave her super powers for a few years. i also did one that was very anime/manga-influenced parody of folklore and mythology where i basically took parts of it i liked and changed them around however i wanted.  and the heroes of the comic were an ineffectual pagan goddess who got kicked out of olympus and a guy who could change sex at will because it turned out he was the son of a demon and a valkyrie (how typical).

in high school i started a web comic starring these guys, a foppish guy with a skull for a head for no reason and a gay guy who always wore pigtails. i later re-vamped the comic with the skull-headed guy as a normal guy (below) and started to redo the series with a more cohesive storyline, but after working on it in some form or another for like ten years, i just got tired of it.

back to the old stuff. this is yet another comic i briefly worked on right after graduating high school i think. around that time i was really into victorian stuff and ghost stories, so...it's a post-apocalyptic victorian ghost story XD most people i showed it to liked it, but someone i admired who was also a comic artist said it took too long to get going and i couldn't figure out how to re-work it, so i eventually just dropped it. still had the anime-ish influence thing going on, obviously.

around the height of my zombie obsession, heh. probably 2001-2003?

zombie studies from my sketchbook. i think i paused the romero movies and drew from them. XD

my first-ever completely digital artwork, haha. i was really into the mixing cute shit with gore thing right after i discovered junko mizuno.

circa 2004, i think? during this time i was trying to figure out my "signature style" or whatever, so i was copying the styles of a lot of artists i liked. right here i was really into foo swee chin.

super old eve. she's the love interest of the straight guy from the pair of guys above.

for a little while i was really into doing these shitty, crude, vector-shape drawing things. 2005 probably?

this is an actual album cover i did for my friends' band in like 2003-2004. i'm so shocked that they actually paid me and told me i was a good artist. at the time i was really into old black and white cartoons and thought they were kind of creepy.

imitating mizna wada here.

i drew cutesy shit like this for a while, mainly because girls really liked it and it was marketable.

sketching from life. that lady was really wearing that shirt.

cave girl stuff. this is what basically lead to Nyla, a character that hasn't been in anything yet but i plan to use her one day.

first sketches of Sidney.

that's about all worth looking at i guess (or not looking at). one thing that kinda bums me out about looking back on this is how much more prolific i was when i was younger even though i sucked. guess i have a lot to work on.