#well..I haven't used gouache for many years....

[awawawwa0]

Son and Heir (gouache practice)

[5hehzada]

2023 summary of art, with 2022, 2021, and 2020. some thoughts below

sometime in the first half of the year, my surface stopped working, and the current laptop i'm using doesn't display colors or values quite right so drawing turned into a bit of a struggle for the remainder of the year. i switched to using CSP's gouache brush around june, which i think made drawing a little faster and a little more fun as well. got back into inazuma eleven this year, and i think that got me drawing a whole lot more again.

i had a few months where drawing was just...difficult. i think march was the worst of them, i drew exactly one thing that entire month. but other than that, i think i drew quite a bit this year?

i still haven't broken out of drawing so many bland headshots, but one of the things i wanted to work on this year was trying to draw more backgrounds and to some extent, i achieved that because there were a lot less plain gray backgrounds this year as compared to previous years. progress!

i do think i've improved, i do think there's things that i'm better at drawing/coloring now than i was before. my lineart still isn't good but it's markedly less messy than it used to be, and i'll take that as a win. it's taking a while, but i'm getting a lot more comfortable drawing hands. etc.

the one thing i'm not satisfied with right now is my style itself, so i think finding out what i want and what i like is something i'll try to figure out this year. another thing i'd like to work on is...rendering folds. proportions/anatomy, backgrounds, expressions.

anyway, i was pretty down about my art towards the end of the year in particular but looking back through my archive i don't think it was such a bad year for my art at all. i'm fine with this, slow progress is still progress.