Improvement Meme 2007 - 2016

Heya all!

After a couple of years I finally decided to fill out this awesome meme. I always found it very inspiring to look at other peoples improvement and I hope some of you can get inspired by mine aswell! 
I had so much fun going through all my old art, especially the really old ones from 2007. It's hilariously bad!  I decided to only include Digital Artwork that I made through the years. I also made a lot of Traditional Art, but I have no idea where it is at this moment and most of it is not good. D:

I tried fitting the descriptions in the meme it-self, but they're too long so I will add them here.

2007:
Everyone starts somewhere. My "journey" into Digital Art started here, in 2007. I was 10 years old and (looking at the quality of these pictures) discoverd MSPaint! I had no clue what I was doing and used the mouse for my drawings. The bear in the third picture is a comic character I came up with, I made a few comics but I have no idea where they are. My mom used to be my biggest fan!

2008:
Sadly, I couldn't find anything but this one picture of a tiger/cat character. I was still using Paint and also Photofiltre.

2009:
In this year I started to scan my traditional drawings and color them on the computer. I still had no idea what I was doing, those colors are just awful!  In 2009 my sister wrote her own book, she was 10 at the time. I made the cover for her book, which you can see in the first picture.

2010:
This year changed a lot for me! I watched Spirit Stallion of the Cimarron for the first time and I became addicted. I loved how those characters were drawn and I wanted to do the same! I also joined a forum/game website about horses called Horse-Nation. And thus my horse drawing period began! (To be frank I'm not even that much of a horse fan, I even find them a little bit scary! It just kind of got out of hand..) I also got my very first drawing tablet this year. A Wacom Bamboo. I left Photofiltre and Paint and began using GIMP.

2011:
Horses.. Horses everywhere! The amount of art I made this year is incredible. I made like 2/3 drawings Every. Single. Week. In this year I found out about deviantArt. I immediately started looking for people with the same interests and found boribaby who now goes by her own name, MichelleWalker. She became a huge inspiration to me and my work got heavily influenced by her style.  I also discarded GIMP and started using Photoshop.

2012:
I feel like this is the year where I really started to develop my own art-style. I started paying a lot more attention to backgrounds, color and ambience. Where I used to pick a darker color for shadow and a lighter color for highlights when working on shading, I now used different colors for shading like blues for shadow and yellow for highlights. I also found a new shading technique which I still use to this day. I made a tutorial about it during that year. (Also, I drew something that's not a horse! Woo!)

2013:
This is the year where I started to spend hours on backgrounds and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I also experimented with lineless drawings like you can see in the last picture.

2014:
The previous year I started college and where I still had time/motivation in that year it started to decrease during this year. College took a lot of my time and I had to travel 2 hours everyday, so when I got home I didn't really feel like drawing. There's still quite a bit of drawings this year though! The last picture was our family Christmas card that year!

2015:
This year I wasn't very active on deviantArt. I felt burned-out. I drew horses for years! I was done with it. But everytime I posted something other than a horse it pretty much got ignored, because people watched me for my horses. This resulted in a huge artblock. I also became too busy with other stuff. I did an interernship where I had to draw fulltime, so when I got home I didn't feel like drawing for myself, hence the inactivity. I did start to take drawing more seriously though. I learned about perspective, color, light and anatomy and I also began drawing a lot of humans as I had to for the company where I did my internship. I still work for this company as an illustrator.

2016:
This was the worst year for activity on deviantArt. I still suffered from that same art-block. The first half I didn't work on any personal projects, I only worked for other people. The second half though, I found that spark again. That spark I had in 2011. I worked on a lot of personal projects and I experimented a lot! I tried different styles, digital painting, chalky brushes, different light effects, semi-realism and I began paying more attention to color. I also realised that I shouldn't just draw for my watchers, I should draw for myself! I decided that if I wanted to draw something other than horses, I should just do that. Doesn't matter how many views I get, or how many times it gets favourited. Atleast I have fun making it and experimenting, trying new things.

And I think that's the most important thing about making art. You should have fun doing it! Don't limit yourself by drawing what you think the public wants to see, draw what you like and experiment!

All art by me 
Original Meme

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