Echo's Plebeian Art Dump (2012 - 2019)

I would've posted an art dump on Beata, but the main difference here is that there are a lot of aspiring artists on WCC in comparison to Beata - I wanted to dump all of my art (from as old as I can find them to my most recent) to show people that, so long as you practice and try your best, you can improve and become a great artist! All you have to do is believe in yourself and you will succeed. Never give up and that's all you need to know. Don't compare yourself to others in a negative manner - compare yourself in a way that, "They're doing something right that I'm not. How can I fix it in my own art?" Don't ever think "I can't do it. It's too hard. I'll never be as good as everyone else." because you can be just as great as everyone else! Just keep trying - I promise, it's worth it. Even if you think you aren't improving, just take a look back at some of your old stuff! You'll notice a huge difference in a few months if you're making an effort to go through it all.

These are in order from oldest to most recent, with oldest at the very top... Sorta. I lost track because I got lazy around 2014. I cringed having to dig through some of this stuff again. BEWARE - THERE ARE A LOT OF PICTURES IN THE SPOILERS. If your computer can't load it, I'm sorry. ;-;
Honestly, looking back on it now, I did a lot of uploading to dA, which can be why you might see a lot more pics from older years than more recent ones because I'm a pleb and uploaded to imgur without making an account.
I actually lost a lot of my 2015 and very beginning 2016 art because my laptop destroyed all of my files one day to be funny. It wasn't funny. There were three million WIPs on that thing and I'm really sad I didn't keep them somewhere safe.
If you aren't a fan of looking at bad art, skip to 2015/2016.  

2012:

Summary: The year I got my first art tablet and stopped doing sprite art by ripping off Pokemon stuff. I started drawing with a LOT of Pokemon because of Pokefarm and wanted easy prizes and such because there seemed to not be a lot of good artists on the site. lol Quite frankly, I was overconfident and thought I was a super hotshot at everything. I only used SAI because I saw a lot of YouTube anime artists use it - if the professionals used it, then surely it means that if I use it, my art will be just as good! Trust me, I hate looking back on this art because of how shaky and poor my abilities were back then, but if this was how I started out. I'm glad to see how much I've improved since then.

2013:

Summary: An awkward assortment of stuff, ranging from Pokemon to MLP to kemonomimis. I'll be honest and say that I had taken a few requests here and there, with the very last picture at the end being the "Cat to Human" requests that I took a long time ago that people jumped on the bandwagon to get. My lines got better, thank goodness. I had a lot of MLP stuff from RPing with Badge, Icee, and Kitty on RiM. It was also the first year that I developed a legitimate OC to call my "persona" online... I have abandoned that design forever now.

2014:

Summary: Probably the year I improved the most. I took the time to actually start looking at references and poses and everything. My coloring and everything got better, especially by the end of the year when I committed myself to my Essentia project with my friends. Unfortunately, we've abandoned said project because of a lot of time constraints and everything, but it was one of the things that pushed me to keep learning to draw. Maybe we'll pick up the story and everything another time. I'd love to, if possible. I experimented with designing clothes a lot too and had tons of fun with it - it eventually became something that I do a lot now.

2015:

Summary: The year where productivity went down the drain because of school and my dad stole my tablet from me. I had done a lot of stuff regarding drawing at the beginning and end of the year. Unfortunately, they were either for Pokefarm contests - which have now been deleted - or they were on my old laptop and disappeared into the abyss, sans the Skype archives that I don't want to dig through because it's a The Dark Forest hole trying to dig through Sleepu VI Britannia  and Chu's late night talks on GoT or something random. Spent a lot of this year doing designs and chibis. Chibis, chibis, and more chibis. They were the big thing - Chibify Beata!
Some things missing here that I remember but am unable to find the files for...
> RPG Beata girls
> Character Signature Sketches
> Character Headshots
> etc.

2016:

Summary: It's been four months and I can honestly say that my art has only been working itself in the last month. My tablet had gotten confiscated again and with trouble from parents, I couldn't draw... Quite frankly, I sorta stole my tablet back and figured out their password just to draw again, but fjalsdjfl;; Yeah. I decided to focus some more on finishing my drawings instead of leaving them as WIPs like what I did in 2015. That one awkward traditional Frisk is from before I got my tablet back - the chibis were done before the Frisk. As for why three million of the pictures have the same pose, they're from my Beata Design Requests, which I had explicitly stated I'd be designing a new outfit for people's charcters on the same base - because time constraints and laziness. Currently working on the couples chibis (which I sort of forgot about until I was scouring the pictures I've done this year) and pics for my Beata characters - full design. I'm really bad at drawing guys, which I want to work on. Hopefully I'll get to working on backgrounds and such at some point too because plain nothingness gets really boring and I want to draw something that looks really pretty with an amazing scenery. Chu's Pikaroo is something I hadn't done in two years - draw a decent looking creature. Even then, it was only a sketch.
My designs for my characters are really inconsistent because my preferences and tastes keep changing. The very last pic at the bottom is the one I finished last night. Looking at it now, I'm rather proud of it because I managed to finish the drawing, but... I can spot mistakes, haha. I've improved a lot since I first started drawing and I'm glad I never quit and gave up.

It's the same way I've improved a lot in RPing too, but that's for next month for my 4-year anniversary being a part of this community with everyone. I spent a lot of time experimenting rather than finishing, but now that I might've found a style that I like, I think i'm going to focus on completing art a lot more. Hoping to see a lot of improvement in 2016 too.

If you made it this far or skipped to the very end, congratulations~ I have an art process for you on my latest drawing. Maybe it'll help you a bit. Don't compare your art to mine based on end results - there's a lot of hard work and dedication going to these pics, a lot of scrapped layers and recycled ideas, deleting and frustratingly redoing line after line. If you want to compare anything in regards to art, compare not how nice and appealing it looks, but rather the time and practice you put into it - I'm not talented; I worked to get to this level and I still need to work to keep getting better.

Process:

• Really rough sketch on the character's pose. The use of basic shapes let's me get my ideas down without letting them fade away because I spent too much time trying to get details in. For pose variety, you can always use references - there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! - and you take into account the character's personality or what you generally want from them. I wanted a nice and preppy pose that let the character's youthful and childish nature shine through.
  
• Change of plans on the pose. To be honest, I'm rather disappointed in the reason behind the change - I changed it because I couldn't properly draw the sleeve foldings for the raised up arm. I gave up because it was too challenging; don't do that - you never learn if you don't take challenges head on. If it's too hard, keep trying and trying until you get it right - look up references, look at real life people, POSE yourself, etc. There's really no excuse for it besides laziness; I even went ahead and hid one of the arms to be even more lazy. I'm a bad person. I threw in all the character's details here, from clothing to hair and such. Throw in basic eye shine and everything to make sure the eyes wouldn't look super derpy later on. Had a few clothing folds to see where I'd want it to be when I color later. This is all done on multiple layers after lowering the opacity of the basic sketch.
  
• Lineart is the bane of my existence. It looks nice and neat right now and everything, but this is my trick: I always do my sketches on a bigger canvas than what I want the end product to be like. I do all the lineart in black and finish it and after a bit of cleaning up, I shrink the canvas by half. This literally gets rid of a lot of a lot of stray lines for you and makes it look neater - also pretty neat if you want thin lineart and can't, for the love of the world, do it properly. Trust me, this lineart looks super wonky to me. I had started over multiple times and even then, I didn't want to keep this one because the eyes looked really off. Your sketch is the barebones of your drawing - do not, please, try and trace over the sketch perfectly. Lineart is where you want to fix as many of your mistakes as possible... Admittedly, I screwed up the face during lineart and never went back to fix it. @-@ I was going to give you guys an overlay for how different the sketch and lineart where, but I can't get the overlays to work properly, so that's for another time.
  
• I did the test and threw in colors. Used a lot of different ones here and there for testing until I was satisfied. Honestly? I still think the eyes look bad and wanted to start over again; looked awkwardly cross-eyed and the face looked better on the sketch in comparison. But I went with it anyway. Added in all the simple details, like shirt design or scarf markings as well as the gray shading of the eyes and the completed mouth. Some of the design changed from the sketch in the end because I decided to do so for my own preferences. There's a whole thing on color theory to help with picking colors and everything, but I've never personally learned it - it's common knowledge to know what colors clash or not, especially depending on saturation. If you're interested, Purplekecleon's How I see Color: A Tutorial is very good for learning. There are also some very nice color palettes here and Yamio's skin color palettes are also good too! It's okay to color-pick from others' drawings, but it's much more favorable to your advantage if you pick colors yourself because it's a learning experience for you.
  
• Shading, shading, shading. The one thing I don't really know well because there's so many different things to learn to shade. To be honest, my shading is all guesswork with a general idea of where the light source is and staring at a ton of references. Outside of that, it's all ??? You can honestly tell my shading is a mess. Adding in the eye colors and everything, I'm really glad I kept the lineart where it was because the end result came out really nice imo. The face still could look a tiny bit better, but that's okay. I like to color the lineart with the clipping mask and preserve opacity options on SAI - black is very flat and adding color makes it look nicer and more appealing. I also add a layer on top of everything to add random hair strands flying out that don't belong to the lineart. Personally, I just use a normal pen tool, airbrush (transparency), and blur tool to do my shading with the fringe effect here and there on layers. It's nothing really special. The eyes are pretty easy to figure out too because I have a rather simple and easy style currently.
  
• Finishing touches... Sorta. I got lazy and decided not to open up Photoshop to do some sharpening and such. Handmade those accursed dotted circles that I never want to do again. There's pretty much no change from the last step to now except the addition of a strange cutesy background thingy. A lot of artists like to do some overlays here and there to mess with the colors and make it look more vibrant and dynamic, but I prefer keeping it the way it is.
  

So yeah, that's my process. c:
Unfortunately, I don't really like streaming while drawing because I have a lot of stuff opened up and studying at the same time while trying to post and asfjaklsdfjl;; I multitask a lot and feel a lot of pressure when streaming so I sort of stopped and just started taking screenshots while I'm working to give people updates. If I did stream, it'd be a super rare occasion and probably happen once in a millennium.

To get this out of the way...
Onward to the rest of 2016 and to the years to come!

Really, congratulations if you read all of this. This was mostly just me wanting to get this off of my chest and prove to myself I've gotten better at art. ><

Holy words and advice I needed

Your way of drawing is beautiful (me not being able to draw hands and everything). Compared to my art your's is a bit stiff (in my opinion) I mean I love it mine is newb compared to yours but I think mine is a bit flexibler. I am probably wrong On this because yours is obviously better than mine (except for dem thigh gaps) but yours is great otherwise.

Kes wrote:

Holy words and advice I needed

You can do it <3

Ivory&Cinnamon wrote:

Your way of drawing is beautiful (me not being able to draw hands and everything). Compared to my art your's is a bit stiff (in my opinion) I mean I love it mine is newb compared to yours but I think mine is a bit flexibler. I am probably wrong On this because yours is obviously better than mine (except for dem thigh gaps) but yours is great otherwise.

Haha, that's a first. I've never heard my art being rather stiff, but I can see where you're coming from.. Sort of? If you mean stiff as in not as much variety in style or anything, I suppose so, since I'm working on finding a set style that I'll stick to. If you mean the characters themselves are stiff, I definitely understand that; I'm hoping to work on giving them a lot more fluidity and motion to give a less-static look.
I'm glad you think my drawings look nice~ Don't worry about me being better than you because I used to be at the exact same level. Just keep working towards drawing and keep trying, and eventually, you'll get to a level you're satisfied with.
For hands, it's always best to look at references - as with a lot of things. Pose your own hands, look it up on Google, etc. etc. I like to refer to this tutorial and these tips every now and then when I get stuck. Hope these help you!

This is amazing! At the moment I'm doing realism, turning out to also have a new style. Anyway these are great, keep it up!

Thanks so much <3
Good luck with your new style and keep working on your art! I'm sure it's great~

Okay, I know bumping up over-a-month old threads is not allowed generally, but I wanted to do some dumping of art here since I've been drawing a lot more recently! And by drawing a lot more, I mean I'm only drawing chibis and making a lot of WIPs that I never plan to finish in the future.

Looking back on some of my art this year, I just want to pull my hair out a bit - especially of the very last two pieces. The lines were way too thick in some areas and the shading could've been a lot better; should've taken the time to make it a bit neater. Maybe I'll do one of those redraw memes in the future.

These are kinda in order (my memory is a little hazy for the first few). This is just me dumping my art in places. Some of them are Beata characters that I'm slowly working on references for.

Lots of pictures (be warned):

If you can name the last three characters, you're my best friend ever. If you can name the character before those three, I want to marry you. The last three were drawn in the past week, with the very last one being worked on two days ago (and then me getting lazy and neglecting it). My style for chibis is becoming a lot more solid and I'm getting satisfied with it, for the most part.

no but seriously, you get a free chibi or something if you can name those last three. one more chibi if you know the last four.

Wow! You are such an amazing artist! I am not that great, but I draw with my finger on a phone so that's probably my problem. I really have been looking for advice like the advice you gave, which will really help me in drawing.

Ah, you're such a brilliant artist!!!

Oh wow that's amazing I wish I could do that

waitwaitwait hold up. i didn't expect to know who the last three were ;v;. i've lost the game, but! Tales of the Abyss! :D! My fuzzy memory thinks that the third to last is Luke, and the very last is Tear, but I know Guy for sure! Guy, my son! i have to find the game now. my dear, dear son. i forget how much i love him. i love you for drawing him.

That Bleu Natsu wrote:

Wow! You are such an amazing artist! I am not that great, but I draw with my finger on a phone so that's probably my problem. I really have been looking for advice like the advice you gave, which will really help me in drawing.

Ah, you're such a brilliant artist!!!

Thank you so much! That's really encouraging and uplifting <3
If you ever need any help, I wouldn't mind giving advice as best as I can, but you might want to take it with a grain of salt since I'm not the best and I'm definitely not an expert. >_<

Karou wrote:

Oh wow that's amazing I wish I could do that

Haha, thanks~ Trust me, I started off really badly! With practice, anyone can get really good at drawing - you just need to put the time and dedication into it.

Night wrote:

waitwaitwait hold up. i didn't expect to know who the last three were ;v;. i've lost the game, but! Tales of the Abyss! :D! My fuzzy memory thinks that the third to last is Luke, and the very last is Tear, but I know Guy for sure! Guy, my son! i have to find the game now. my dear, dear son. i forget how much i love him. i love you for drawing him.

Holy crap, Night, I love you. The Tales of series is my favorite thing in the world and knowing that someone else knows the series makes me so happy. Q^Q I'm such a fangirl about Abyss currently, I'm sorry. You got them all right without fail. If you can't find the game, know that there's actually an anime you can find online with 26 episodes. It's not exactly the same experience, but it follows the story fairly well; I actually rewatched it before starting to draw these.
Still working on the rest of the party, then Ion and Mieu, and finally the God-Generals. I can say all of this while knowing for sure that someone actually knows them. You made me day. Please marry me.

I absolutely love your art! The best part about this is that you encourage others to show their full potential through practice, and that is the best thing our world needs :') I too want to become a digital artist, and yes I use SAI too because I know that my online friends has used it and that it's good and such. However I haven't had the best time using it, so I just stick to drawing on paper. In my opinion, digital art is so much easier with all the tools you already have (and a lot more cooler!), but it would take practice to understand how to do it! I haven't looked on tutorials yet as I don't really have the time to do it.

Glad you're progressing more ^^ I really enjoyed reading this <3

Caitywolfy wrote:

I absolutely love your art! The best part about this is that you encourage others to show their full potential through practice, and that is the best thing our world needs :') I too want to become a digital artist, and yes I use SAI too because I know that my online friends has used it and that it's good and such. However I haven't had the best time using it, so I just stick to drawing on paper. In my opinion, digital art is so much easier with all the tools you already have (and a lot more cooler!), but it would take practice to understand how to do it! I haven't looked on tutorials yet as I don't really have the time to do it.

Glad you're progressing more ^^ I really enjoyed reading this <3

Ah, thank you so much~ It made me smile so much reading this, haha. SAI is such an amazing program, and it's super useful with my drawing needs. Drawing with a mouse for digital art is really hard to be honest, so I applaud anyone who can do that since I use a drawing tablet; the cheapest option I know of for the Bamboo brand (Wacom and Intuos being their two most well-known) is about $70. Definitely helps that digital art has all of the tools since traditional tends to get really expensive if you want to get really professional and fancy.

If you ever need any help or want to know any cheap neat tricks with SAI, I'd be glad to be of assistance at any time. I've had a lot of time to get really familiar with the program. c:

Wish I could I have been wanting to make a career out of the art I can do but been trying to get better around work and everything else.

Karou wrote:

Wish I could I have been wanting to make a career out of the art I can do but been trying to get better around work and everything else.

It's hard to make a career out of art - I'm personally too scared to try and start at the moment since I have such an inconsistent way of drawing, haha. But don't worry about it! You have a lot of time and anyone can start drawing at anytime. Maybe if you have free time, you can work on it some more and make a modest living out of art. I know you can do it. c: