Personal Art Development - 18.5.22

 Throughout my first year on the illustration course I believe that I have vastly improved in both my personal artwork and my artwork within the course. In September of 2021 I would say that my confidence within my artwork was quite low, although there where the odd few pieces that I was proud of, I still did doubt a lot of my skills, comparing a lot of my outcomes to the outcomes of others. Previously in my art journey, I would just remove and bin whatever I didn't like, making it difficult to track my progress, however in the past year I have tried to stop myself from doing this as often, so that my sketchbooks feel like a more loved item than just a burden that I don't want to look at.

During most of lockdown, I often worked digitally on my iPad, using the program procreate. Although my digital work was decent, I neglected the idea of working traditionally as it was again, a lot easier to erase my mistakes whilst working digitally. Late 2021 was the time I began to work both digitally and traditionally side by side, even combing the two on occasions to experiment with the types of outcomes I would create. 

My main creations have always been characters, creating pieces centred around a character and their design, and it is obvious over the years how this has influenced my current, and hopefully future work. I really do enjoy creating character designs as I fully enjoy the idea of bringing your own little character to life.

 

Something a lot more recent that I started to allow myself to use was references, in past years I would assume that if I used a reference each time I drew, that it was some sort of cheat, or that it meant I clearly wasn't good enough if I needed to use one. In recent months I finally allowed myself to create artwork with references, and although I haven't been using them for as long, I can already see the improvement with my Anatomy and figures.

Something I never thought that I would do, is put my art in an exhibition, I assumed that no one would like to buy my artwork, or even see it in a public showing. This year I took the opportunity to create a themed piece of artwork for a college exhibition, and while I was there I witnessed someone buying one of my prints, this was something I never thought would be possible, and seeing it myself meant a lot to my personal development, it sort of clicked this idea in my head that my work was good enough, even if I didn't think so at first.