2022 Art Journey!

we put together our 2022 art summary a few days ago (which you can see here), and thought it would be nice to sorta talk through our art journey this year. because we've reached a point where our visible "art style" has stayed relatively stable the entire year, but it feels like we've made so much progress.

january to march we did a lot of humans, and human faces, and also hands. we shaded january's piece and then barely shaded anything else this year at all. oops. captain's reference sheet (february) had hands we were very proud of at the time. we also started experimenting with how the hell to draw hair. brian's portrait (march) was an attempt at curlier hair by outlining the shape and airbrushing strands. it's not... the best, but it works for the simpleness of the piece. we'll come back to hair later, because...

april to august was Pony Time. we designed so many mlp fan characters, we started two ponygrams, we went absolutely buck wild. may's image is a portrait of smoke only because we didn't have much digital pony art, but we were sketching a ton in-between final exams. we recreated an entire backdrop from the show to fit our headcanons! (the crystal oak tree in june) we made our 11-year-old self proud by learning to draw ponies from different angles (july's flurry heart). august's piece is one panel of a comic from our ponygram, where the main character is imagining himself back in his human form.

september was the beginning of attempting to balance our style in-between realism and cartoony. we tried to scale down the Big Anime Eyes and really try to give everyone good-looking noses on our more serious pieces. quick doodles usually still had a flat triangle or shaped nose. october's piece was pose practice, referenced from a screenshot of splatoon 3.

the weekend before halloween we started listening to steam powered giraffe, a band that still has a vice grip on our brain. it's definitely a special interest at this point, but in november it wasn't yet. around this time we started experimenting with hair again. we tried using one color and drawing out the big shapes, and then individual strands. sometimes we'd go over the whole thing with a brush to make it look more like actual strands. still not sure whether we want to keep doing hair this way, because it looks a little too flat. you can see we were still doing Big Anime Eyes sometimes, because the jon's eyes in this image are giant orbs. it fits, though—we wanted to draw attention to the robotic eyes and the fact he's not human.

december! we didn't do much in the first half of the month because finals, but once we got home it was Robot City. learning how to shade metal was really fun, and our method definitely isn't perfect but we're proud of how Metal the bronze looks. we started a project of redrawing every steam powered giraffe album cover with our fanbot, the conductor, inserted in. december's image is our redraw of the 2011 version of album one. we adore how this one came out, especially the conductor's hand. we did sketch over the album covers directly to get the original bots' general poses, but changed a lot and didn't usually look back at the original until it was time to color the background. i think that's fine, especially when it's just for a fun piece with our oc.

overall, we're incredibly happy with the progress we made this year. we're happy where our abilities are at now, and excited to learn more! we want to practice posing humans and maybe finally figure out how to draw satisfying hair.

anyway, the steam winter sale is calling and we probably won't be doing any share-worthy drawing until next year, so see y'all in 2023!