History of Art

This is a history of my art, with some of my earliest (surviving!) artworks from when I was a young child. I’m always saying that I’ve been drawing since I could hold a crayon, and here are some drawings to prove it! I hope you find these interesting in showing the development of drawing through the years. I hope to inspire young artists in being able to compare what they are creating at similar ages to the artworks below.

This is my oldest surviving artwork, because it was my Mums favourite! It’s a portrait of my first cat Mejsha, sitting on an armchair. I drew this when I was about 3 or 4 years old.

This is one of my earliest figure drawings! I drew this in preschool, around 4-5 years old. We always drew on scrap paper from offices, you can see the text showing through the drawing in the scan. While this is a messy little picture, it’s pretty advanced for that age! See the articulated limbs, neck, clothing and almond shaped eyes? I’m so proud of this one!

I was very proud of this when I drew it! Even though I never DID get her face right (hence there not being one!). She is mother nature. I was never raised to any kind of religion, but for some reason, goddess images started coming out in my drawings from a very early age! I had this photocopied to colour in because I didn’t want to ruin the original… but then I lost the original anyway! I drew this in primary school at about age 11. This was when I began using references for my artwork, looking at myself in the mirror for figure poses, and photos of animals from books for all the different animals.

My first elf/dryad. I started drawing a lot of fantasy characters and beings in early high school. This was when I was 14.

Aah, and my first group portrait! I started roleplaying, playing dungeons and dragons mostly, and I just loved the idea of adventuring! Not so much the monster hacking and loot getting (but that’s fun too!) but just the travelling and being in a group of adventurers and good friends. This is an artwork to try and show that! I was about 15 when I drew this, and I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to make this a night scene, but I’m still proud I drew SO many people on one page!

These three artworks show a progression of my work. I kept going back and redrawing this artwork over the years (a moon goddess, of course!). From the left to right, the first I drew when I was 11, the second when I was 16 and the third when I was 17. The relatively large jump in development from 16-17 was when I started self teaching and practicing my art more through my interest in comic book illustration.
It was around this time I started to work on projects as well. I wanted to create entire books, whether they be novels or comic books, and working on those meant I was growing much faster as an artist. I really believe having a larger project is a great way to learn faster. A lot of these projects were also encouraged by my high school, that allowed students with a major work they wanted to do, extra access during class time to work on those with help from teachers, as well as major works within class as well. When I was about 14, I was still heavily into RPGs and fantasy novels so my project was writing a book. I wrote almost 20,000 words of this story, which went no-where, but I did do a watercolor artwork for the cover.

Then, for a while, it was all about comic books. I created three “complete” comic books between the ages of about 15-17. By complete, I mean only about 8 or so pages long and with a story that didn’t go anywhere, again (learning to write complete stories is a whole other story).
Magis was for my year ten major work, age 16.

But when I was given free rein, I created this shockingly derivative and overall awful superhero one.

Then I went back more to my fantasy roots at 17 with Fatebound.

Around the same time, during art classes, we were learning more about realistic portraits and techniques like using photo reference and gridding. I used to joke that my art style “all started with Bruce”, as the portrait of Bruce Willis taught me so much. I went on to continue loving graphite as a medium for many years and create Fallen, an entire graphic novel, in that style when I was 17-18 (the angel artwork below is a page from it).

After highschool, during my university years aged 19-21, I was taking a lot of character portrait commissions, and practicing my own art style, different mediums. This is when I really went back into fantasy art again, with goddess and fairy art being a main focus. I was creating a LOT of work during these years. You can see some of it in my secret hidden archives gallery.
By the end of university (age 21), I was establishing my name as a fantasy artist, and created what I consider my first collection of saleable fantasy artworks. One of those was Villa, which starts to resemble more of what you see in my work today.
 

 
I’m probably just being too nostalgic, but I hope you’re enjoyed this little excursion into the past as much asI have!