Childhood Drawing Redux

Oooooo, the dark theme with aqua text is back; you know I’m feeling nostalgic, ha! I just can’t stick with a light background. Maybe one of these days I’ll make a site theme that has a dark/light toggle, so if it’s really annoying to others it can be toggled off.

Anyway, I recently organized a 3-ring binder with my oldest artwork from middle school and high school, and decided to tackle redrawing as much of the contents as possible, starting with the oldest.

Below is the sketch that I kind of think is the oldest one I have. It’s really hard to say, as my oldest sketches don’t have a date, so it’s more a vague memory. If I had to guess, I’d say this was 8th grade, sometime in 1998 or 1999. I was just starting to get really into finding anime to rent from the local video store. I’m sure I had a combination of Marle from Chrono Trigger and Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War in mind while drawing this. After cutting out the drawing, I proceeded to pin it to my bedroom bulletin board, which I constantly changed around, hence why it’s marked up with little holes all around the edges ^_^*. And look at how that non-archival paper yellowed. Ah, the passage of time.

For the first redraw (top of the page pictured below), I decided to try copying the style as much as possible – over exaggerated anime style eyes, noodle-y style bangs. I really like how lining it with brown colored pencil turned out.

The lower drawing, I tried doing it more in my current style (I guess? I don’t really feel like I have a style, meh). But just trying to make it look new, while following the general character design, simple as it may be. I also decided to starting thinking of this redraw as one of my D&D characters, but was playing with name variations. My 5e bard/fighter character is “Ellisara” but I wanted something a little longer.

And now for the final “OC” style character spread (below)!

I settled on the rename “Reiellasara”. I tried again to go for an extremely stylized anime character in the upper right, then a more relaxed style in the lower right. And then some different angles of the face on the left page. Those were much quicker, with the under sketch in light blue marker. The drawings on the right were mostly Copic fineliners and Copic Markers, with a little color pencil background on the top drawing. And some washi tape, because I didn’t like how the handwritten version of the name came out, so I printed a little label. 😅

By the way, do you like my background fabric? I picked that up like…last year…I think at a quilt fabric store, and then tucked it away in the bottom of a drawer that had my art supplies. Happy to be putting it to use!

I created four more spreads like this that I still need to photograph and post, with a few of my other original characters and I’m very happy with myself. All of them were of original characters I’ve had floating around in my mind for forever, and that in turn has really lit a fire under me in practicing, watching online courses, etc. Seriously, I love redraws so much! T__T

Finally breaking out of feeling stuck doing study after study (though I still enjoy those and want to do lots more!) – now I feel freer to actual make characters and scene illustrations and such.

This week, I’ve been doing a lot cleaning and also drywall work (blargh to ongoing house renovations), so my shoulder is super sore. I’ve been trying to be as proactive as possible with ibuprofen, ice, heat, and stretching, so it doesn’t turn into chronic-headaches-every-day-with-a-weekly-migraine that sometimes happens with my neck >_<. So far, so good *knocks on wood*. I should probably keep this post short to not anger my shoulder more with typing…

But, before I go, I found my Spotify “wrapped” today very funny – my top songs of 2023 were:

1. Hiru no Tsuki, Akino Arai
2. Tidecaller, League of Legends
3. Moonsong, Adrian Von Ziegler
4. Scarlet – Piano Solo, Junko Iwao
5. Tsuki no Ie, Akino Arai

But then it proceeded to say my listening style was “Vampire: When it comes to your listening, you like to embrace a little…darkness. You listen to emotional, atmospheric music more than most.”

But my top songs are so relaxing and peaceful! And my top artist is Enya! 😂 I basically listen to the same dreamy playlists over and over, haha. But I will say, a lot of my other playlists fit the vampire description. “Dark Academia for studying and reading” etc… Enya on the outside, NIN on the inside? Haha. Maybe layers, like an onion – Enya / NIN / Joe Hisaishi / The Amazing Devil / Dove Cameron / Medieval Lofi / etc… Although I honestly haven’t listened to enough NIN in years, blah.

Well, time to actually rest my shoulder.

‘Til next time.