Aqua Steps: 2019 Version
I know the story behind this piece like the back of my hand; I spent the summer of 2019 with my grandparents, and for few days where we had plans, there was one day in between them were nothing planned at all. Prior to one of those days, I wondered to myself "I wonder how long it would take me to work on a drawing, from start to finish." That thought spawned this drawing, where I recorded my steps over a single day. I worked about eight hours straight, from 8:30AM until 4:45PM on this piece, stopping only for bathroom breaks and lunch. Understanding my workflow and the amount of time to go from start to finish was worth it, but the pins and needles and headache I dealt with afterwards were NOT worth it.
Before I began coding, I used a different file management structure for organizing art, and one that... wasn't very organized. There were folders for finished pieces, unfinished pieces, pieces I scanned into my computer, pieces I made on different art programs, and each set of characters had a system just like this. I also used spaces between words, which takes up more space in the system and makes the file harder to read in the command line. Less than two years after finishing this drawing, I've learned about camelCase and it's made file management MUCH easier for me. It allows you to make file names with multiple words without having to use spaces or filler characters.
Before I discuss the piece itself, I want to shed some light on my art setup at the time. All the drawings from my Inkscape era were done on my first laptop, which I had from February 2015 until November 2019. Unless drawings were scanned into my computer, I sketched them out using a 2015 Wacom Intuos tablet (the smaller model) on either Photoshop, Pixlr, or Clip Studio Paint before transferring the sketch to Illustrator or Inkscape so I could outline and fill the rest of it using vector tools. My setup required lots of space, especially since I had a second monitor that was really old, and 17-year-old me didn't know any better. The main reasons the Inkscape era ended were because my first laptop experienced slowdown issues so significant that it took several minutes to start up, and because I decided not to transfer Inkscape to my second laptop. My second laptop was reversible, so I bought a pen for it and practiced sketching on it using Clip Studio Paint during my study halls. By 2020, I stopped relying on two art programs and instead focused on what I could accomplish with one.
Onto the piece itself, I noticed a few differences between this piece and when I drew Aqua at the end of May. Aqua's eyes are larger, her brows are no longer covered by her hair, she appears more expressive, her design has better shading, her proportions are slightly different, and this was the first time I drew her sword (which got redesigned in December). I also remember using Aqua's bangs as an excuse for me to avoid drawing her ears, which were difficult for me at the time. I can't explain why I made her shoes pointed or why the eclipse emblem is so hard to see, but I know that my lines were so sketchy because digital sketching was still new to me and it felt different from traditional sketching, since the only way to figure out your pen pressure traditionally is by figuring how difficult your lines are to erase. As I got better in digital art, these lines grew less sketchy and more solid, but I'm still not comfortable showing my early sketches unless it's for a drawing like this.
While gathering data for this piece, I found early versions of Aqua's redesign from April of 2020. I can't wait to write about those, but I hope you enjoyed this educational glimpse into my art's past, and I hope you learned as much from reading this as I did writing this.