Improvement Movement 2019

Along with my yearly recap of art in general, I revisited an old project this year called the Improvement Movement!

It was hard to keep up with it in addition to doing daily projects and things, so some of my last ones were done late, but it was a fun way to keep on working on projects that helped with world-building throughout the year.

Here's a recap of what I did each month:

This was a project I did with a few of my friends, and was meant as a way to keep us all drawing, and kind of simulate the feeling of drawing together. We did the same projects and would post them in a channel on Discord.

It was a fun project, but with everyone having busy lives and other projects, it was hard to keep up as a group. I ended up barely finishing all of the prompts, since it did take up a lot of time, but overall I think it was a fun project.

I don't see us doing it again this coming year, but maybe we'll revisit it another year in the future with some new prompts!

Check out our website here to see everyone else's!

2019 Recap

So it's that time of year where the year is ending, so I'm gonna reflect a bit on how this year went. Let's start with how it went in my art:

I started out by experimenting with inks and watercolors to try out some different traditional mediums. It was fun and I enjoyed the ink tests. I ended up doing a few illustrations of scenes from The Nays, but not a whole lot. I did my 47 Days of Positivity project again. I did Inktober, Huevember, and Digicember as usual. And then some sketches here and there.

Overall, things went pretty well, but something felt kind of static.

I feel like I wasn't really getting into my drawings a whole lot this year. I was just kind of drawing for the sake of drawing and posting, rather than for fun like I used to. I was looking at how many Eventures I wrote and it wasn't a lot for this year. I redid a bunch towards the beginning of the year, but once summer hit, it kinda went downhill.

At my job, summer is a crazy time and it's easy to feel overwhelmed and busy. I think that's why I would play video games or do something less involved when I was done with work or on weekends. I also visited a lot of friends in the fall and winter, which meant going out and having fun. While I love doing those things, I was noticing that I kind of neglected working on my story and drawing for fun during those times. And that left me feeling kind of unfulfilled in a way, even though I was having a lot of fun doing other things.

So overall this was a really weird year for art. I drew a lot and accomplished a lot of things, but it didn't really pay off and put me in a weird place, artistically. I have some plans that I'll talk about in my next 2020 post, but that's all for now!

And as a bonus, here's my 2010 recap to show the difference between the beginning and end of the decade.

Old Forgotten Posts of 7 Years: Part 2

This is part 2 in my old blog post series. I'm setting the date for 2019 but posting this compilation technically in 2025!

Mr Dude Redesign (December 29, 2019)

For December's Improvement Movement prompt (and the final one of the year!), I decided to redesign Mr Dude! 

Here's his final design! I included the different hair concepts I made in the process too.

And then here is his old design to show a side-by-side comparison of what I improved, too.

Life Drawing (October 19, 2019)

These are some various life drawings I've done the past few months.

Yaguzi's Family (September 29, 2019)

I've been planning out eventures all weekend, so I decided to make the Lynx family tree to try and figure out how this family works. They don't have names yet, but that'll happen soon!

Here's the family tree!

So basically, Yaguzi is 25% deamon (which is about 50% demon). I was playing around with the idea of how deamon traits are passed down through families. I decided that demons likely come about when deamons breed with another species, since they become more people-like. Since Yaguzi's family lives in Compass World, they become demons pretty quickly down the line.

For his grandparents and great-grandparents, I got a lot of inspiration from different types of cats. His great-grandpa is based on a Norwegian Forest cat, his great-grandma a tiger, and then his grandpa a maine coon. This was a lot of fun to make, since I really think genetics is interesting and how important it is in how characters look, in relation to their families.

Ralphie (September 15, 2019)

After a bunch of traveling, it's been hard getting back into drawing often. I've been trying to do some quick doodles to get back into it though.

Here's a quick doodle of Ralphie!

More from The Nays Comic (August 8, 2019)

I realize it's been about a year since I've drawn a comic page. I've been so caught up in writing more of the story and making concepts that I haven't really spent a lot of time drawing the beginning. This was fun, but also took a lot of time to draw, so I guess that's why I haven't been keeping up to date on drawing these. Maybe I'll draw more before another year passes!

Read the previous pages here!

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Shelter 128 Floor Plan (August 3, 2019)

Here’s a floor plan of Shelter 128. The M and S Nays generally spend a lot of time here when they’re not on missions. Bird-in-Trainings use the computers in here to do work, and one of the Higher-Up Birds resides here to oversee work.

This was originally for this month's Improvement Movement challenge, but I might do another one since I'm not sure if I wanna draw a full illustration of this one yet.

Kominushu (July 8, 2019)

Some more NAD drawings I've done. I usually don't get to do these in the summer, so it's been fun to finally draw some of these more main characters!

Kominushu is the kind-hearted younger sister of Trekkon who looks up to him. She is very calm and gentle and likes to see the good in others. She believes everyone has a little good in them, even if they choose to do evil deeds. Despite the hardships she’s gone through in her past, she has always kept a smile on her face and stayed positive. Her strong-hearted personality has made her very likable and inspired others. She’s close friends with both Clove and Sarah, and will do whatever she can to keep her friends safe.

Hide & Seek (July 7, 2019)

I've been writing the Hide & Seek Eventure, so I decided to do some quick sketches of a bunch of the scenes!

Detective Ragger (May 23, 2019)

Some more sketches!

I've been playing Detective Pikachu on 3DS and it's been making me want to get back to working on Detective Ragger. Maybe someday I'll have time to make games for myself again.

Sketches with Emotion (March 5, 2019)

Sometimes I get that feeling where I put a lot of myself into the sketch and it just flows better and looks less stiff.

Here's a shot from the Eventure I rewrote. Gair's running from the White Cloaks, and in turn, even pushing his friends away in fear.

Gamishness Revisited (March 3, 2019)

I decided to start up this project again of drawing the Eventures of The Nays in the style of games I've played.

This one is Dragon Quest I (or, Dragon Warrior, as I played). I played this game a long time ago, so I don't remember a whole lot about it. This Eventure is Complex.net when Scott and Chozu take over the Bouncy Room, so this is the Bouncy Room Lady trying to defend herself against them.

Midi Inspirations (February 24, 2019)

I've been in the mood for listening to midis recently.

I called this the Music Mania Easygoing Remix since I listened to the songs twice in a row instead of once so I would have time to put quick colors behind them. I'm planning to use these in a game I'm making.

Biggert City Sketches (January 9, 2019)

Some drawings of Biggert City characters!

My friend was jokingly saying we all needed to draw frogs, but I took her seriously and drew Josinda.

 

When DMunn obtains The Gek's powers and takes over his brother.

Sketchbook Planners

These are just a bunch of sketchbook doodles I've done in the past few months.

Some quick inking tests when I was doing inktober.

I was helping my brother figure out the proportions for his Indivisible fanart, so I did this sketch.

A quick draft of my first inktober, but I didn't like how it was turning out, so I redid it.

Firebreath's Exploration

This was the first full project that I coded from scratch in JavaScript! It's a short choose your own adventure game where you follow Firebreath, a self-proclaimed dragon, through various scenarios.

Play the Game at this link:

I created this as a present for my brother's birthday. The style was inspired by one of his favorite games, Famicom Detective Club (which the music also comes from).

This was a short project made for fun, so enjoy!

Here are some screenshots from the game:

Return of Gesture Drawing

It feels like it's been forever since I've sat down and done gesture drawings from a website. I used to do it a lot before I was busy with work, but lately, it's been hard to find time to do any. But I finally found a bit of time to do a few, so of course, I'm very rusty!

 

 

Detective Pubby

For this month's Improvement Movement prompt, I played around with colors and lighting. I decided to take a scene from Detective Ragger for this one. I wanted this scene to take place at night, but I had fun coming up with different light sources and light colors.

These are all 4 of the variations together!

This is the original with flat colors.

And the process it took to get the flats laid out.

First I did the window lighting.

And here's the window lighting process.

Then I tried out moonlighting.

And this is the process for getting to the moonlighting.

And finally, the police car lighting.

And the final process for the police car lighting.