This week for my Birthday Blog Bash, I’m going to be featuring some of my favourite art from over the years. Considering my site really got its start as my art portfolio (before moving into costuming), there’s a LOT to cover in the earlier years. So this post will cover the earliest — 1997 through 1999.
Obviously I have no posts from 1997, since that was the era of my AOL webpage and none of that was saved, or I just never put it online in the first place. But I did dig up some of it and put it all in one post for posterity.
When I was a wee bairn, I would scan in panels out of comics, remove all the colour and add it back in myself in photoshop. FInally I decided it was time to do it on my own art – I drew Grendel from Beowulf for extra credit in English Class, and coloured him in photoshop.
I was obsessed with the X-Men growing up, and I wanted to work for Marvel. So I drew a lot of comic book inspired stuff back then. I made up an X-Men style team and would write stories about them and draw them a lot, that’s mostly what I found.
Another super early photoshop-coloured drawing. I don’t have a file of this anymore… this is a photo of a printed out version that I had taped in a sketchbook.
In late 1997, I got a Playstation and got into Final Fantasy 7, and fell deep down the rabbit hole of FF7 and eventually anime fanart.
January 8, 1998 – ART POST: YUFFIE
And here it is, my first attempt at drawing a Final Fantasy character… probably from sometime December 1997. This started a cavalcade of more FF7 art over the next couple of months.
February 9, 1998 – ART POST: FF7 COLLAGE
“I’m going to do something really gigantic and amazing of ALL of the FF7 characters!” LOL even the oldest HTML files I could find on this one I was calling it “gross.” But it was probably the first really ambitious project I undertook, at least online.
March 5, 1998 – ART POST: TIFA (FF7)
That’s quite an eyebrow you got there.
March 10, 1998 – ART POST: ASUKA (EVANGELION)
And now we get into the anime stuff.
April 3, 1998 – ART POST: PIPER AND AN ELF DUDE
One of the oldest pics of Piper I have… Piper was my site mascot (which was a popular thing to have at the time), and of course she worked her way into SunDowner later on. I have no idea what the story with this was, though.
June 8, 1998 – ART POST: ROGUE
Revisiting my comic roots… and playing with coloured pencils. I actually still rather like this one (and a few of the other coloured pencil ones from the same time), which is more than I can say for the rest of these.
July 2, 1998 – ART POST: MULDER AND SCULLY
I was SUCH an X-Files fangirl, ya’ll.
July 9, 1998 – ART POST: MORRIGAN (DARKSTALKERS)
This was where I felt like I finally getting a bit better at inking/CGing and it didn’t look quite so choppy.
I also redid this art a couple of years later and I’ve been tempted to redo it again.
July 16, 1998: ART POST: STORMING FLOWER (TEKKEN)
I was so stinking proud of this one.
July 25, 1998 – ART POST: CAMMY (STREET FIGHTER)
This one got printed in Playstation magazine. I flipped out. Still have a copy somewhere.
September 12, 1998 – ART POST: BRITAN
Probably my first art of Britan. By this point I was starting to formulate an idea for my own comic in my head so there were some sketches before this one — but this was the first finished one.
August 27, 1998 – ART POST: CLOUD AND TIFA (FF7)
I was trying to do a real background for once. I was never one for backgrounds honestly.
August 30, 1998 – ART POST: MADISON AND BRITAN
Aww here we go. Here’s the first pic of Madison and Britan in prep for the first issue of SunDowner.
September 29, 1998 – ART POST: REI (EVANGELION)
Experimenting with a different shading style, on top of a sketch.
October 25, 1998 – ART POST: SLAYERS
I was always super pleased with this back in the day.
October 25, 1998 – ART POST: KIELLE
This is one I’m linking more for the story; I did some “chibi” versions of X-Men characters – I was super into Excalibur at the time so it was Shadowcat, Meggan, Pete Wisdom, etc, and IIRC they got used on an Excalibur fanfic site, and then Kielle of CFAN asked if I could do some of her character for the CFAN main site. Unfortunately I’ve lost the actual X-Men ones – they only thing I have is a screencap of my site from that time period that has the Shadowcat one on it, and the two versions I did for Kielle are in the link above — though again, not the finished versions, those are also lost… just the inked versions.
November 10, 1998 – SKETCHBLOG: SOME EARLY SUNDOWNER SKETCHES
I have a feeling these are much earlier than they are marked – I think these were done in class probably a couple of months earlier, probably a bit before the 8/30/98 Madison/Britan pic above, since this is an older Madison design. But it was typical for me to pull older sketches in for sharing to sketchblog — speaking of which, I guess I should explain Sketchblog, since you’ll since stuff tagged that way in the archives. At one point I started up a new blogger, and the whole intent was to post a sketch/unfinished art a day there on that blog. Of course it never worked out like that – I’d scan a bunch of stuff and do good for a couple of weeks and then fall off for weeks afterwards. But anything from that is marked as “sketchblog.”
I also added extra stuff to the sketchblog tag – more recent sketches I came across in my digs, backdated to about when I thought they were done, especially for the “dead” years between 2006-2009.
November 19, 1998 – ART POST: 25K HITS!
Hey so remember when everybody had hit counters on their site and we celebrated major numbers with new art and gave each other gifts like it was a birthday? I guess we kinda do the same thing now with big follower numbers on social media. Anywhere, this is when I hit 25K views.
November 22, 1998 – ART POST: TABBY
So this one isn’t really notable, but I’m including it because it was previously lost. I found the sketch in my old sketchbook, and then just randomly decided to try searching “my old pen name + fanart”…. and actually found a few things I no longer had!! And from there I got on the wayback machine and started looking through old fanart exchanges, and I was actually able to dig this one and a couple of other ones up. Amazing!!
November 28, 1998 – ART POST: BRITAN AND MADISON
This was my fav for a long time of these two.
December 9, 1998 – ART POST: FELICIA (DARKSTALKERS)
Also just… I feel like I should point out that I did not have a tablet at this time. I drew by hand, inked it in markers, scanned in, and coloured it in photoshop by mouse. And I didn’t know how to use layers so it was all right on the same background layer. Seems crazy to me now.
January 28, 1999 – ART POST: REI (EVANGELION)
Another experiment in finishing… I didn’t ink and coloured the messy sketch. (Why is Rei always the guinea pig?)
February 9, 1999 – ART POST: SUNDOWNER PORTRAITS
Early coloured pencil SunDowner portraits.
February 20, 1999 – ART POST: EVANGELION
Anytime I could sneak in doing fanart for a class project, I did. This was designing a CD cover. I did this and inserted it into a CD to present in class.
My teachers were generally very patient with me. Thankfully.
March 14, 1999 – COMIC POST: SUNDOWNER ISSUE 1
Over Spring Break that summer, I illustrated the whole first issue of SunDowner. Brought it home and did the text. There’s no way I could manage that now.
I still remember some of the criticisms I got when I posted this, namely, “If professional artists can use a ruler, why can’t you?”
But I did 🙁
April 21, 1999 – ART POST: RINOA (FF8)
Trying for a more realistic take on facial features…. I did this a few times in these years, but this is the only one in this “style” I see finished.
May 19, 1999 – ART POST: COWGIRL
Growing up I drew horses like CRAZY, so I always looked for an excuse to draw them every once in a while.
June 2, 1999 – ART POST: LEIA (STAR WARS)
Of course around the time Phantom Menace came out I started doing Star Wars fanart like crazy – I’d always loved it but never really drew much related to it before. This particular one I redid in 2017.
June 4, 1998 – COMIC POST: SUNDOWNER, ISSUE 2
And whoa, only 2 months between issue 1 and 2?! Where did I find the time?! This time I did some more clean-up in photoshop before posting and added in some more black tones.
June 24, 1998 – ART POST: PIPER IN MARKERS
Doing monotone marker pieces like this was something I always liked, and eventually this is how I started doing my SunDowner issues.
September 16, 1999 – ART POST: QUISTIS (FF8)
I feel like my way of drawing faces was finally working out and starting to look decent – at least, they started to look like I’d settled into “my look.”
October 14, 1999 – ART POST: SELPHIE (FF8)
Getting better at inking by this point, too, I think. At least an improvement from 1998. Also another attempt at a background.
December 26, 1999 – ART POST: A NEW HOPE
This was super influenced by Hisao Tamaki’s Star Wars manga art. It was the front of my site for a while.
Tomorrow we move into the craziness of 2000!