1 / 34
Jun 22

Look through your old art and find something interesting to share! It can be anything from the first time you drew one of your characters to a drawing that is no longer canon to your story. Or even just post old stuff to reflect on how your art has grown.

I found this crusty old drawing of my latest character addition to my comic, Daevon. Apparently I had to label it for myself “sad emo man” he’s not as sad and emo now lol. I’m not even gonna question why he’s holding a random piece of paper.

My old art is just so funny to me.

  • created

    Jun 21
  • last reply

    Jul 16
  • 33

    replies

  • 756

    views

  • 1

    user

  • 118

    likes

  • 6

    links

Nowadays we take digital art for granted. graphics tablets, iPads, styluses, millions of colours, gigabytes of memory, terabytes of storage, powerful art programs...

In 1991, though, it was not so easy. I had to make do with a 12MHz 80286 computer with 1MB of memory, a 20MB hard drive, a 13" CRT VGA monitor that could display sixteen colours at 640X480 resolution with a dot pitch of 0.39mm and a refresh rate of 60hz (interlaced!), and I had to use an old school mouse with a ball instead of a laser.

This is the first Sam the Shark cartoon that I drew on a computer back then. I used to pump these out weekly for publication in the school paper. It's funny to look back at those old 8-bit files that I still have: Back then file names were limited to 8 characters plus a 3 character extension. This comic was called "Snooze Blues", which was too long for DOS, so the file name was snuzbluz.pcx (pcx is an obsolete image format).

Truthfully, drawing on paper was easier, but computers were the future, dammit! Here's an old paper Sam comic:

I used to do a lot of pencil/graphite drawings, such as this deer:

And stupid me decided that I needed to try to draw that deer on the computer, too.

I am not proud of this. I can't believe I even still have the file. I don't know why the date on the computer deer is older than the pencil deer, because I know I drew the pencil one first, but it doesn't matter. This is frickin' TERRIBLE.

Not all of my computer drawings were so terrible though. I am still proud of this one, especially given the limited resources I had. I drew this pixel by pixel, meaning that I zoomed in and placed every pixel where I wanted it in order to get more than 16 colours out of the old VGA 16 colour limitation (the CB monogram was added years later). It took me two weeks to finish it.

This, by the way, was the album cover for Judas Priest's Screaming for Vengeance. I had earlier tried to draw it by hand with a pencil and was unhappy with how it came out, so to punish myself I redid it on the computer. I was a weird teenager. Here's the actual album cover:

This is likely only funny to me. But here's an old (late 2019) drawing of Kyara. The idea was that this would be her design in Chapter 05. The whole concept is now wildly different haha.

Though, bits and pieces and a basic throughline can be seen between this and the current design.

Haha- that reminds me of one of my oldest ocs.
I think this is from two years ago. I don’t have much digital art of him from when he was like this. It was before I used digital much.

Bro- he was so fruity back then for no reason :sob:
Him now.

He’s a completely different person.

Okay, so this is a wild ride.
Here are some of the earliest drawings of my characters. Still experimenting at this point.


I then made a prototype comic in 2020. It’s still on Tapas under my short story collection here: https://m.tapas.io/episode/1989812

The characters have mostly settled into their current forms, but the colours are way off.
Finally, I released the full comic in January 2024, and I’m finally happy with the designs!

I made This old meme (featuring my OCs) in 2022! :joy: It's from a TikTok sound!

I believe this is the first time I ever drew Xivian digitally. (Before his the current plot of my comic had formed and he became the MC) Originally before I made much of a plot, his brother was the antagonist to this character who isn’t even in the comic anymore, and Ian was the evil guy in the background who was just lurking around being evil lol. As you can see, at some point I removed his hairspray rights. (He was abusing them) I also ditched the fancy staff.

I want to add that cloak to his current wardrobe.

It took me a really long time to solidify his scar’s shape and placement.

This drawing of my novel's FL Alicia was weird in a lot of ways lol. Hairline, head size, etc

I've presented these before, but I shall do so again.

The original Friar Chicken, back then, just a funnies concept and much simpler to draw, lol!


And the "first" appearance of him in my more dramatic comic:

I used a more chicken-like beak back then, but I once drew it differently by mistake and it stayed that way ever since.

Bonus: Ugly @$$ Alec Tryon, XD

:skull_crossbones:️ I found a picture of one of my characters about to beat the human form of another character with a table.

He would never actually do this now. Just think about it. A lot.

Well, here's the very first drawing of Sir Kiljaos, the main character of my Karamador comic, from 1999 before he even was a paladin or named Sir Kiljaos. He was just my first attempt on making The Lion King OC and ended up being just a copy of Simba. XD

And here's the first drawing of modern Sir Kiljaos from 2010, this one looking goofy to me as well nowadays. XD

And here's him nowadays.

Here's also an old drawing of fox princess Anima from 2008, with weirdly small lower bodies and extremely bushy tail. XD

And Princess Anima now.