Ten Years Shown in Drawings

This is my first ever digital drawing:

This is my latest digital drawing:

There is about a decade between these two drawings, which kinda makes me feel old. I first started drawing when I was fifteen or sixteen years old after taking an art class and not enjoying it. I know that sounds counterintuitive, I know. In reality, I felt like I was kind of bored in that class, not because I was a super good artist (see: the above drawing), but because of the bland, formulaic approach to art. Now, when you learn art, you do need to pay attention to color theory, perspective, and proportion. I just think that the class left very little room for expression. It was a high school art class, so I wouldn't expect a Pixar animation class. I just didn't understand why those things are important in art until I actually started drawing on my own.

Art is a lot like the slow growing process you go through on your way to maturity. You have to learn and change and make mistakes. You often have to do the same thing over and over without knowing if you're actually improving or not.

(All of these are about two or three years apart.)

And then, you notice small improvements here and there, but you're still your own worst critic.

I've come pretty far, but I still have a long way to go. I could definitely work some more on drawing expressions other than the faint "Mona Lisa" smile or general disinterest, and drawing a full human body (including every artist's worse nightmare--hands).

Something I might add, is that in between all of these pictures is a lot of sketching in sketchbooks, on my iPad, and even the margins of notebooks and journals. A lot of little doodles amounted to many hours of learning, which I slowly, but surely, was able to translate to a canvas.

So, this goes to show, don't give up on that new thing you want to try; you never know what might come out of it!