I Re-drew an art piece from 3 years ago. Here’s what I learned.
Tags: Artimprovement, Artist, Artist Opinion, Art, Digital Art

I Re-drew an art piece from 3 years ago. Here’s what I learned.

I am currently 13 years old. Art has never been something that I was fully invested in, as I mostly just doodled on my notebook pages. That is, until teachers started doing those dumb “notebook checks” and taking off points for doodling. Sorry but not my fault your class is boring.

As time went on, I started to draw more. Just on loose leaf and random stuff around the house. This was probably because my brother began to draw more too and for some reason we always have to out-do our siblings. We also watched a lot of anime together; which looking back I think was an inspiration for me to start drawing people. (Also watch Haikyuu, it is the best anime ever.)

Anyways, in 4–5th grade I became obsessed with drawing on an online coding application called “Scratch.” This lockdown, around a month ago, I suddenly remembered it existed. I typed “Scratch.mit.edu” into the search bar and guess what: I was still logged in! I found some treasures there, honestly, as I had completely forgotten about my account and all the drawings left behind in 2017. It felt like discovering a whole part of my life I literally forgot existed. I then, stumbled upon this gem:

Yes, seriously. I do apologize for the quality of it, I just took a picture while I had t opened on my laptop. My ten year old self thought that this was a good idea to draw, ahaha. But I suppose we all had to have started from somewhere, right? I’m not going to judge myself too harshly for this drawing, because it was the beginning. Here is the redraw:

In my opinion, I have significantly improved. But that’s not all I could stand to take away from this experience of redrawing an artwork (which is something I’ve never done before, since there isn’t much artwork to redraw in the first place). I learned from this, several things:

One, we can improve without even drawing. Over these years I have never sat down with a sketchbook, aiming to draw to get better. I never draw, honestly. Perhaps I draw around once a month, if I’m lucky. It’s just hard to find the time and also feel inspired without feeling like your art sucks and there’s nothing you can do about it, except for DRAW MORE- which you also can’t do. But each time you do draw, I think you can see how much better you’ve gotten. It’s not exactly immediate but when you compare your work side by side to one from a long time ago, it becomes apparent that even without constantly practicing it is still possible to get better. I think that’s because over time, we’re observing and we’re constantly learning techniques, even if we aren’t actively participating in them. I’ve never been one to draw often, but what I DO do is constantly watch art YouTubers who have helped me so much in learning about facial anatomy, poses, etc. Some of these YouTubers, if you’d like to check them out, are DrawingWiffWaffles, Coax Illust, Super Rae Dizzle, Kasey Golden, and Ross Draws.

Coax Illust said in one of their videos that drawing can be so difficult sometimes, because someone can tell you it looks wrong without them even being an artist. Because they have seen people and they know what people and objects are supposed to look like already, even if they can’t draw it out any better than you. Unlike, if a normal person sees a surgeon perform a wrong move in surgery they probably wouldn’t know. This was totally unrelated- I just thought I’d share because it stuck with me. Now the next thing I learned:

Two, you don’t need money to be an artist. I used to always blame my shortcomings on my materials. I would say, “Oh well this looks bad because I’m coloring with crayola crayons,” or something along the lines of “I wish I could have an iPad Pro with a cool stylus (which costs like a thousand dollars),” as if having better tools would magically improve my art. And sometimes, it does. Materials make a difference, but for the most part I’ve come to learn that it’s not the art supply but the artist.

I have seen so many videos of people doing cool artworks with just some crayola markets and other cheap supplies you can probably steal from a school classroom. It’s just that before, I had SO heavily relied on this ideal, while knowing I could never afford these luxuries as a lower middle class child with two other siblings. I would be drawing and instead of trying to improve I would say “I’ll improve, but only once I get (art material or whatever)…” I soon learned that this wasn’t true. For this drawing I downloaded an app called “ibisPaint X” and drew on my phone with my fingers.

Long story short, if you have a phone and can download this app on it- you can become a digital artist. Drawing like this is honestly easier than I thought it would be, it just took a little getting used to and I also had to find my digital art style.

(Here is my first ever drawing on the app; I did use a reference picture for it):

It’s quite rough, but it helped me learn more about the fundamentals of digital art (for example, using layers, clippings, flipping the canvas, getting used to the large plethora of different brushes and textures, etc).

And last but not least, lesson #3. Digital art is literally a godsend, oh my goodness. I know a lot of people prefer traditional over digital, but this last lesson is really more of a personal realization of my preference. I just found it much more liberating, drawing digitally. I had so many more options in brushes, brush sizes, all the colors I could ever imagine, filters, and more at my disposal by watching a single ad to unlock it all for free.

I suppose that’s all I had to say. Just a little self reflection about my thoughts on my 3-year art journey and what I think I can gather from it to take with me in the future.

See you next time?