A Neurodivergent Artist’s Art Retrospective: Part 1

I’m presently going through some art block right now.

I do like digitally illustrating, but sometimes, it can be hard to engage with the hobby how I wish to. This time, I don’t have the excuse of mourning a pet. Between diabetes management and needing to help care for my father, I often feel like I lack the time and mental bandwidth for it. But on the same token, I know deep down that this isn’t true. If I push myself to engage with my art, I’ll discover that I have a surplus of time to expend.

A multi-part retrospective of my art seems like a good way to reinvigorate my drive to create. I’ve tried out many different techniques over the years, and I would like to amalgamate the best qualities of each, which I’d only determine through careful study. At the end of this journey, I will come up with a mission statement for my illustrations… and whatever I intend to do with them in the future.

I won’t cover every piece I’ve done, only some of the most notable. I may go back to the ones I skip later, however. The only notable pieces I won’t be covering will be the two I discussed in this post. It’s not because they are above analysis, but I have other, similar pieces to look at without such heavy subject matter attached to them.

While I’d been drawing all my life, it wouldn’t be until around late 2019 to early 2020 that I started taking illustration more seriously. Digital Art appealed to me the most, and I started with Firealpaca, a very solid starting point for anyone getting into the medium. It does have a big caveat: its features are bare-bones compared to its contemporaries. It certainly has more options than, say, Microsoft Paint, and it is certainly possible to work around its limitations to create some truly beautiful pieces, as many artists have. But being a fledgling artist, I hadn’t incentivized myself to explore past some of the default tools. It would take a while to explore new options in Firealpaca, as I simply didn’t want to try the more powerful alternatives… And unfortunately, I developed some bad habits, a lot of them showing up in The Dead Tree.

This piece was my first finished attempt at digital painting. I took a sketch I had done with multiple colors and simply filled in the empty spaces between the lines. There wasn’t too much direction behind this piece beyond the composition, which is solid. I like how the moon is framed by the dead tree’s branches, and the color choices are neat, though I find them random when it comes to how the sky looks. But the aspect that handily outclasses it in randomness is the color blending. It’s everywhere, due to a misguided attempt to make the coloring look fancier. It ends up looking incongruous with the sketch, which has its own issues. While it’s common for artists to skip the line art phase by reusing a sketch, they usually clean up their sketches first, and I left mine deeply unrefined. I am a lot more careful about that nowadays.

There’s another aspect of the sketched lines that isn’t necessarily a flaw, but a preference that fell out of my favor over time. Early on, I was deeply opposed to anti-aliasing—a digital art phenomenon that, for those unfamiliar, smooths out the pixels made with a digital brush. I did this to make the flat-coloring process easier. It’s objectively more straightforward to fill in color with aliased lines; without tweaking settings on the fill-bucket tool, the small, translucent border on each line that allows anti-aliasing to work leaves unsightly seams between them and the colored spaces. That way, I could blend the colors later once I had the flats down.

The Dead Tree shows off many of my growing pains quite well; there are probably about fifty other flaws in it that I haven’t addressed. But even still, I value it for its raw experimentation. Few things that it attempted were successful, but in hindsight, the execution of my color-blending is somewhat reminiscent of how I would apply texture to my pieces much later. That wasn’t the only seed that was planted, either; trees would come up again in some big ways years later.

After The Dead Tree, I took a break from environments to revisit my character designs, which are their own can of worms for a later part in the retrospective. I wouldn’t return to painting locations until the latter half of 2020. Mountains was among them, and it shows a marked improvement from my first effort, accomplishing nearly everything The Dead Tree did with a lot more deliberation, save for the subject matter.

I quite like the color choices I made here. They are directly inspired by Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage’s Skelos Badlands level, a hot, craggy environment full of lava. The piece certainly could’ve received more lava—or even smoke—but I was far more concerned with establishing atmospheric perspective. The further a mountain is, the more orange it gets, matching the lowest color of the sky. That’s the aspect of this drawing that I think aged the best; you get a strong sense of distance by just letting certain elements blend more into the background.

You can also see that my line work has begun tapering at its ends and varying in size occasionally. Someone pointed out how I would benefit from tweaking the pen pressure settings of my drawing tablet to allow this, and I’m glad I did. Though the linework is still a little rough, the varying size shows a bit more care than what I had done previously.

By this point in my artistic journey, I had switched over to Medibang Paint Pro. Functionally, it is very similar to Firealpaca, with a few more features dedicated to comic or Manga creation. I downloaded it because its darker user interface is easier on the eyes… and that was the only significant difference between the two programs for me. I once again stuck to the default tools, identical to those found in  Firealpaca. For all the improvements I had made, I think I was stagnating in some ways.

My allergy to anti-aliasing was still in full force back then, leading to those same consistency issues manifesting again, this time in how the clouds are shaded and how the mountains are textured. While the colors I used were solid, they were firmly dream-like. I’m not one of those snobby artists who thinks realism is objectively the best art style, but it would’ve benefitted me if I experimented with true-to-life colors earlier. If nothing else, it would’ve helped me better understand what makes or breaks the wackier color schemes I used in those older pieces.

But there was a far larger issue within the piece’s construction. I used way too many art layers here for how simple it turned out to be. For those unfamiliar, think of layers like these translucent sheets that hold paint, which you stack on top of each other to create a complete image… Now imagine me stacking about fifty or so to make this.

Ostensibly, this was intended to help me correct my mistakes, allowing me to make non-destructive additions and have full control over their visibility. It would take me several years of doing this to realize all I was doing was working in a scenario that required tons of unnecessary micromanagement. For that, I was more liable to make mistakes, such as drawing something on the wrong layer and then having to stop and correct it. My wording already implies that I’ve since shaken the habit, but it was not easy. It’s going to manifest again throughout the retrospective, always with new complications attached to it.

In hindsight, looking at these pieces now, it is funny that I swore against anti-aliasing for this piece, only to use digital brushes and tools that naturally complicate the coloring process and never question why. Still, it’s good that I at least tried to use those tools, even if they weren’t as successful as I wanted them to be. My perfectionism would rear its ugly head the following year, disallowing myself from such experimentation for some time. It should be no surprise that I look back on pieces like these in 2020 a lot more fondly.

Next up will be a selection of 2021 pieces. For now, if you have your own early artist stories, I’d love to hear them; learning from the past can be valuable.