CURRENTLY WORKING ON THIS WEBPAGE

All of these words are probably going to be replaced with words that I want to be here more, but for now these are the words we've got until I feel like putting those other words here. A rough explanation of what this is is, I'm gonna be putting my drawing progress here below. This is basically everything that I've drawn in one sketchbook, up from when I decided to try to actually learn to draw. I've drawn in my life before, but honestly some of those experiences were kind of traumatic for me; I naively thought an IB art class would be fun and chill, only to get whammied by my school deciding to force us to do a 2 year curriculum in one year (only for standard level, or SL, IB art students, of which I was the only one in my class). On top of that, me being the only standard level art student in a class of higher level, or HL students, made me super self conscious to the point where I was literally drawing hunched over my paper to hide it (if you're wondering how I could draw like that, I couldn't.)

I naively thought an IB art class would be fun and chill, whilst also letting me build up my abilities in digital art, only to get whammied by my school deciding to force us to do a 2 year curriculum in one year (only for standard level, or SL, IB art students, of which I was the only one in my class... yay me). On top of that, me being the only SL art student in a class of HL (higher level, aka talented as fuck) students made me super self conscious to the point where I was literally drawing hunched over my paper or putting other papers or my arms over it to hide it. If you're wondering how I could draw like that, I couldn't. I basically just acted like I was drawing the best I could and did most of my work outside of class. In terms of technical skill (as in, the ability to make what I wanted to appear on the paper actually show up on the paper), I was just not very good. Prior to that class, I had some minimal digital art experience, but the curriculum emphasized doing projects in several different mediums. Acrylic, colored charcoal, scratchboard, etc., I couldn't even get a foothold. I had to accept help from my mom too, and even then I was barely scraping by, staying up late and ruining my sleep. My mom let me skip art class sometimes, and by the end of the class I'd had so many conveniently timed "doctor's appointments" that there's no way the teacher didn't know. In retrospect, maybe she understood some of what was going on and felt sorry for me. This was just one facet of my life at the time, fitting into a wider continuity of my history of depression and all of the wonderful (sarcasm) things that involved, but for brevity I won't go into all of that. even more humiliating was that I had to pick pieces to display at the end of the class in an art show, which I didn't know as I was making most of the pieces. I thought I was done and rid of them, because the experiences associated with each of them made me feel awful and sick when I saw them (even still sometimes, to some degree). Nope, they were hung in the school for weeks until the big event. , and I took a long break from them, so I'm kind of starting from scratch.

I'm not going to update this webpage every day most likely, but I'm stil going to try my best to keep at learning to draw and drawing consistently every day or almost every day. Another thing is, at least for now, I'm not using any references other than ones that are my own (i.e. photos I've taken, usually of myself) or anything like that external basically; same thing for tracing, I'm not keeping myself from tracing my own body and stuff like that, but I'm not going to be tracing anything of anyone else's (not saying anything about the ethics or morality of that for learning or etc., I actually want to think about that a lot more, but this is just for what I'm doing now). I'm also not using straightedges or compasses or protractors except to measure things, because I want to be able to learn to do everything I'd need those for myself (at least decently well). I do use those for measurement occasionally, to check how accurate I can draw angles to or how straight I can draw my lines or etc., but nothing else really. (I sometimes use a straightedge to extend lines with dotted lines for checking angles with a protractor).

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