The Beginning

Ever since I started drawing I kept a progression of my progress. Every time I drew, all the way back to when I was doing the 250 box challenge from Drawabox.

At first it was just a gallery of photos (and it's still sitting on my computer), but eventually I started blogging each post on a website to keep track. It lasted over a year, and it got really really cluttered. It was everyday for almost 18 months, and the site became a mess.

I still want to keep that diary thing going, but I don't want the entire site to get cluttered up, so instead I'll put every single progression picturethat I have on my computer in this one post. It spans 15 months, from from November of 2020 to April of 2022. I do have records before that, on an old instagram account called drawreg, but I don't upload there anymore and haven't even opened it in years.

After April I made my first video, and youtube took over my life. But hopefully by the time you're reading this I'll have managed my time a little better and there'll be some actual stuff here.

One more note - for some reason I never drew full pieces of my own. I almost obsessively practiced anatomy and figure drawing to the point where I got really good at it. But then I kept doing it, and diminishing returns meant I plateaued, got frustrated, and even started getting worse. Then I burned out. Hard. And I still haven't fully recovered.

So don't do that :)

Also last warning - there are NSFW pictures here, full or practice. Even if it's just practice, they're very NSFW. I had an NSFW phase and honestly idk if I'm out of it yet LOL. We'll see, but consider yourself warned. There won't be any more warnings

2020

November - The end of the 250 box challenge. These were taken on my bed LOL

Dec 28th - Dec 31st. 250 boxes completed. Onto the arrow thingie?

2021

Jan 1st - Jan 6th. Contours, textures, and beginning figure drawing. This was rough

Jan 6th - Jan 8th. Figure drawing and more textures

Jan 21st - 24th. This was the first time I did charcoal on newsprint and I attached it to the head of my music stand to practice LOL

The last thing for January. I made a big decision on new years day and bought Peter Han's Dynamic Sketching course, which was $799 (out of my $1100 bank account) at the time. It was a gigantic risk and it was worth it. It set me up with good drawing habits that I still carry

February 2021

A SHIT ton of line and cricle and ellipse practice. It sounds stupid but even drawing simple lines can be super diffcult

Feb 4th - Feb 5th. I practiced the bean and more contour practices

Feb 5th - Feb 7th. These were contour and intersection practicfes. I miss the mark on the interesection practice though since we weren't supposed to draw every face. I did figure out how to draw any plane intersecting with any other plane though so it was interesting

Feb 7th - Feb 9th - FX!!! And textures. I hate textures. These were cool

Feb 9th - Feb 15th: Advanced texturing. These were really time consuming but honestly they were really fun

Feb 16th - Feb 18th: Peter's class was fundamentally a class about sketching whatever you wanted, and after the first 3 weeks of the basics, we finally started - with aquatic life and insects! We got to pick what we wanted to draw and at the time it was almost magical. Especially the jellyfish

Feb 18th - Feb 21st: more squatic life. More jelly fish. Lionfish. Octopus. Was proud of that one

Feb 21st - Feb 23rd: I don't remember doing that much aquatic life. After that I kinda fucked around one-stroke animals and it turned out eh

Feb 23rd - 25th. The last of the aquatic life (which now looks more like hieroglyphics) and a start on Zeronis's online course. I was at a point where I thought just taking a bunch of courses would make me a master artist, which was not true LOL. You gotta practice. That anime girl was a trace (a part of an assignment). I would end up buying a ton of class101 classes but only ever really going through with a few of them

March 2021

March 1st - Figure drawing and inanimate objects

Feb 2nd - part 1. I remember having a lot of trouble with that gun LOL

Feb 2nd - Feb 4th: Preliminary hands and back to figure drawing because at the time I was worried I hadn't done it in forever and would forget it

March 5th - March 6th: More beans and figure drawings. Looking back this was an omen of what the trend of my practice would become...

March 6th - March 7th: Figure drawings, land animals, beans, and the preliminaries of anatomy. It looks kinda stupid now that I know human anatomy pretty well, but it was exciting for me at the time

March 7th - March 9th: More land animals, but I remember this was the one week in Peter's class where I really struggled. I feel like I held myself to too much of a high standard and honestly organic lifeforms weren't the most intuitive to my brain at the time

March 9th - March 11th: This was the week where I got really frustrated. That owl gave me so many problems, even though afterwards Peter literally just drew a round contour line around it and it looked fine. I felt so stupid HAHA

March 11th - March 13th: More figure drawing and the final stretch of Peter's class: inorganic objects/vehicles. And this was way more my speed. I think that preference was probably due to my preference for preciseness at every step, and that was present vehicles

March 13th - March 14th: That green car gave me shit ton of trouble. Then Peter said it was raised so the car wasn't all on one perspective plane. I felt relieved

March 14th - March 16th: I feel like this was where I started to hit my stride with the vehicles(/big ass cannons). It started to look really good and was a good sign of what was to come...

March 16th - Cannons yknow? And began the process of figuring out ATVs, which would come to be the pen drawing I was most proud of. But it took like 6 pages of figuring it out...

March 16th - 17th: That ATV render was my pride and joy. And the rest of the vehicles (land at least) went really well. And before you say anything, it was 2021. The Ukraine War wasn't a thing yet. The plane would prove to be pretty hard for me though

March 17th - The plane gave me a lotta trouble. The lambo was not as much trouble. In fact it was really easy. So easy I decided to reverse storyboard a lambo commerical - to explore what that would look like. It turned out alright, but as soon as humans came into the picture it kinda became... rough

March 17th - March 22nd: The last of the storyboard and more figure drawing. The same figure drawing. You're seeing a pattern here aren't you?

March 22nd - March 23rd: More figure drawings and I started Bryce Kho(?)'s class101 class about pen drawing. It was more watercolor and brush pens, which was something I thought was cool at the time, but looking back on it that was a completely unnecessary class. But whatever, I took it, in my fervor of just taking as many classes as possible. The ironic thing was I'd never finish that class (or any others tbh)

March 26th - March 30th: More figure drawing

March 30th - March 31st: Moved on to forms in the Proko figure course, but since I'd taken Peter's class those were a piece of cake

March 31st - More organic forms. Was cool

April 2021

April 6th - Aprth 8th: I think I decided to take a break from drawing after the end of Peter's class. He told us that there would be people who would keep drawing and people who would forget the skills taught in class because they didn't practice afterwards. I told myself I would. I didn't LOL

April 8th - April 10th: Hey look more figure drawing and beans

April 10th - April 14th: Sometime around this time I was invited to be a beta tester for the Proko 2.0 website (the website up right now). Believe it or not the Proko website was kind of a disaster before. They were holding a contest for monster designs and I was sure I'd win because I just took Peter's class. Spoiler alert - I didn't

April 14th - April 15th: It's a good rule of thumb to say whatever actually looks like a complete picture was a part of a class, and yea. That "complete picture" was a part of Kamochiruu's class101 class. I really liked her art and honestly was lowkey crushing on her for a little. Just off her art. It was... well whatever

April 15th - April 16th: At this point my figure drawing was getting quite good for what it was (only about a month of practice). But being on the ground and not looking at the bigger picture the only thing I could think of was if I could improve faster. Pro Tip: Don't do that. Have fun. Don't try to optimize for max efficiency because it will burn you out.

April 16th - April 20th: That ball was part of a.... procreate class? I don't even remember tbh. I remember being proud of it though

April 20th - April 21st: More anatomy, more figure drawing, more of Bryce's class.

May 2021

May 1st - May 4th: Same same. I started watching nichijou around this time. The nichijou logo is there in that really odd picture of a snowman running away from a ton of forklifts. Can you find it?

May 4th - May 5th: I graduated from graphite pencil to pure charcoal and it honestly felt really freeing. Also graudtaed from the bean to the robo-bean (ie just a bean with planes). It was hard but after a while it became intuitive

May 6th - May 8th: Baby's first steps into shading. Aww look at him.

May 8th - May 12th: More complex pen drawings in Bryce's class. Keep in mind these were without layins (ie just drawing the lines raw). They were hard as fuck

May 19th - May 22nd: I remember posting that plane picture to drawreg where some friends were following me and one person said it looked like an album cover

May 25th - May 28th: MUSCLES. AWWW YEAHHHH

May 28th: Figure drawings but with a fountain pen. Was interesting

May 28th - May 31st: More of the same. It was pretty wonky

June 2021

June 1st - June 4th: That blend S sketch was the first instance where I actually drew something that I kinda wanted to - anime stuff. Too bad I woudn't get back to drawing anime for a while, since I was so obsessed with trying to "improve" as fast as possible

June 4th - June 14th: Hands. Animals. More hands. Oh god hands

June 14th - June 20th: I started the anatomy class I would eventually take - I forgot who I took it with but Peter recommended him to me. I would learn all my anatomy knowledge from that class and it was honestly pretty chill

June 20th - June 22nd: Ahhh yes, anime face sketches. I realized how simple they were compared to the stuff I was doing. And I was proud of it. That Maika face was my @drawreg's profile picture (I think it still is) and was for the website for a while. I was super proud of that.

June 22nd - June 27th: At this point I'd also started Marshall Vandruff's composition class, and was introduced to notan studies. I'd also moved on from the robo bean to more complex representations of the torso, which didn't end well when I started (as you can see). I took a lot of classes jesus christ

June 27th - June 29th: More figure drawing. Jeez some of these are really bad now that I look back on it. These pictures that are coming up were part of Marshalls' class where he tasked us with going outside and finding interesting compositions. Most other people were adults with acutal cars and stuff. I was a freshman in college and could only walk around my neighborhood

June 29th: I had something for positioning the sun iwth something in the frame. It was really hot that day. But pretty peaceful

June 29th - June 30th: A very confused notan, a very confused watercolor, and an empty highway. Empty highways are a vibe - I think I discovered some mode on the iphone that allowed for long exposures but I don't remember what it is anymore

July 2021

July 1st - July 2nd: I took my dad's car and drove up to a part up the hill towards my middle school. I didn't realize it back then but looking at the pictures now I think I was slowly discovering my preferences for backgrounds, since most of these pictures are pretty wide shots

July 2nd: The horros of drawing faces. Let's just... not talk about them yea?

July 4th - July 11th: Water color, pictures, digital drawings, and more... more developed faces let's say

July 11th - July 15th: At this point I was deep in the anatomy class and I was learning a ton. It was cool

July 16th 0 July 23rd: My perspective class started around this time. It was a nightmare. Perspective classes aren't particularly hard, but they're just long and repetitive. They're SO repetitive. And drawing circles and ellipses in perspective are a real bitch

July 24th - July 30th: Baby's first introduction to shading. I was really bad at it LOL

August 2021

August 1st - 9th: Legs. Thighs. Ass. Yes.

August 12th - August 16th: At this point I bought an art book by Achiki (Atikix) and honestly I fell in love with her art. I literally stared at her OC for hours. I'm serious.

Spetember 7th - 14th: Ah yes. My NSFW arc starts HAHAHA. Also I practice hair for a while and honestly got really proud of it

September 14th - 22nd: Honestly I got really good at mannequinizing here (or decent enough) that I probably coulda just moved on and started rendering. But I wanted it to be *perfect*, and that decision would cost me dearly later.

September 22nd - 30th: More anime stuff. I was enjoying this stuff tbh

October 2021

October 1st - 10th: Per usual, I signed up for Rossdraws' bootcamp and then never finished it. And that shit was expensive. So like... yeah idk what I was doing.

October 11th - October 14th: I actually started drawing because of a webtoon idea, and that picture with the rings above the girl's head was supposed to be the main character. I tried to draw that ATV again, but the time I'd spent not doing the stuff I learned in Peter's class was really showing at this point

October 14th - 17th: Another incomplete picture. I think it was inspired by some irish song (the one about Luigi selling seashells and capitalism and shit)

October 17th - October 18th: I remember it was at this point where I was starting to get really rustrated with my perceived imperfect mannequins when in reality if I'd just moved on a few months ago I probably would've been fine

October 18th - October 19th: I tried to start some background drawings. Those never amounted to anything because I was too obsessed with figure drawing

October 22nd - 26th: Honestly looking back on some of these they're pretty good. That cat girl became the next pro pic for @drawreg and this website.

October 26th - 28th: I really liked the art by Chunnibyou's artist and I tried to see how she did the rendering. I never got that far.

November 2021

Nov 1st - 2nd: You can see my obsession with figure drawing now

Nov 3rd - Nov 4th : As you can see I got really obsessed with this guy's art (@Hisenkaede on Twitter)

Nov 7th - Nov 8th: I skipped a few days of practice. I think this is when I felt the burnout start happening

Nov 9th - Nov 11th: Oh boy that NSFW pose though

Nov 11th - Nov 15th: At this point I think I was just going around in circles. I was too disatisfied with my current work but a t the same time too scared to go on to other parts of art, so it just became a massive drag.

Nov 15th - Nov 24th: It's always awkward to say that this NSFW phase was the only time where I actually finished a picture.. and even though I don't feel any shame talking about it, saying that fact is really... really hard to say LOL

Just. We don't talk about this jesus fucking christ.

After this the burnout started hitting me hard. It feels really... shitty to say that that picture was the last full picture I drew.

But at this point my consistent "only doing figure drawing" was causing me to view drawing as an extreme pain in the ass and I started to lose interest in it. A little bit after I lost interest in the NSFW stuff because it turns out that looking at lewd stuff is one thing, actually drawing it is another.

A few months after that I burned out.

December

2022

January

Jan 11th - Jan 14th: Here I realized clothing is hard as fuck. And I shoulda practiced stuff other than figure drawing more. The realization that I was doing something wrong with my practice really affected me ngl

Jan 14th - Jan 24th: I was really proud of that purple shirt. And I tried to do a study of a character but it didn't end up going anywhere because I wasn't good at doing color studies

Jan 25th - Jan 31st: I watched Love is War. I liked it. I also liked Konosuba. So I figure a crossover drawing would be good. But as soon as I inserted the colors it became a mess as color theory caught up with my ass

February

Feb 13th - Feb 17th: For context that Chika drawing that looks actually decent was meant to be a full study. Another in a long series of stuff that I never finished. It was at this point that I also started a color class, and those are some notans.

Feb 18th - Feb 22nd: Upon noticing that my upper torsos weren't very structural I proceeded to attempt to do a full 360 turnaround of the upper ribcage structure. Honestly it helped out a lot but I never finished that either... LOL

Feb 22nd - Ffeb 26h: Journeys into shading

Feb 26th - Feb 28th: Some of these value studies took FOREVER. But I was really proud of them.

Feb 28th: Exploration into heads, using a method from New Master's Academy. It was really interesting

March

March 6th - March 10th: I was proud of these

March 10th - March 12th: More. I was proud of these too.

March 13th - March 18th: Hey there's the first channel profile picture!

March 18th - March 20th: I was hella proud of that colored picture. I even made up the volcano in the background from my mind. Holy shit. It was so cool

April

It was a pain in the ass to get all of this off my progression folder and into this one post. In fact I have to back and delete/unpublish all the progression posts now too.

But honestly doing all this made me (forced me) to appreciate how far I went in that short amount of time. And it honestly makes me wanna jump back into it, now not just worried about how fast I can get in as short amount of time but how much fun I can do it too.

This was a nostalgia trip for sure, and for anyone who made it all the way to the end, I hope this illustrated how consistent practice can actually get you somewhere.

Or, something like that :)