big-waifu
Big Waifu's Old Art Retrospective
I have collected over 15 years of drawing books and will be posting them in a mostly chronological order. ALL MY ORIGINAL ARTWORK, I AM ONLY INSULTING MYSELF. You will see how I've struggled to slowly improve as an artist, and maybe from that, you will pick up a pencil and start struggling alongside me!
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BOOK: #1
DATE: 2002
THOUGHTS: Zeroing in on the chibi formula.
This one is really more of an update to the inaugural chibi post from awhile ago really to demonstrate how fixated I was in trying to get the style right.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS BACK THEN: Any Questions?
THOUGHTS NOW: I have several, yes.
I've been really looking forward to this one.
When I was flipping through this book for pages to analyze, I had become vaguely aware of the emergent gender saga that I was experiencing from a very young age, but I must have unquestioningly glazed over this pages for the same reason one doesn't stare too long into the sun.
As I had mentioned before, the story of my self insert oc- Pyre- involved a troublingly lengthy arc in which he is forcibly transformed into a female. The hijinks I imagine ensued afterward were likely "Ranmaesque" in their scale and seriousness, but even when the saga ended and the status quo was returned, Pyre was left with the, well- uh- "Launchesque" condition to swap genders at a sneeze.
I cannot overstate that I do not want to speak for my child self and say that it was a pretty clear indicator of feelings I had that led to me eventually transitioning. I can only speak in retrospect and attempt to rationalize my strange kid behavior to my adult self. It is, at any rate, amusing to be a transgender woman on her 3rd year after transitioning and seeing my kid self exploring these topics in their own way and with obvious interest enough to express visually with their art. It explains nothing concrete, but pages like these have gracious closure that I can live with. It is also amusing that I named this saga the "He/She" saga because I don't even think it was ok back then to refer to someone as that. Sorry!
Just saying though: If I could grow boobs with a sneeze, I wouldn't need all this dang estradiol.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: 2002
THOUGHTS: Yoshi!
There's not much to say here. It's just Yoshi. I'm pretty sure I still apply the same method for drawing his head that I did all these years ago.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Various 2002-2006
THOUGHTS: An attempt at a robotic character.
I seem to remember this character just being named "Killbot." He was actually a reformed murder machine who eventually joins Pylon Pyre's crew as one of his loyal buddies. His narrative- if any existed at all- is lost to time other than that. What a shame.
What I am posting this for is just the sheer tenacity I had approached this design with in redrawing him. It is worth noting that the bottom one (the one I had kindly graded with an A+) was actually my brother's exhausted attempt to show me how the design could be improved. I attempted to iterate on this design a few times over the course of a few years, and I can be almost certain I was never terribly satisfied with it. I wonder if I should give him another try in 2024, huh?
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Spring 2002
THOUGHTS: A rename so epic I had to make a poster for it.
It is patently hilarious that for whatever reason, I decided the entirety of my self-insert oc was stupid and lame and needed everything to change about him. The condition of never ever settling on a single self image is something that haunts me to this current day, and it is amusing to see the first recorded instance of a change.
Sorry fans, as you can tell by my incredible wordplay, Pylon now goes by 'Pyre'. Whereas his abilities used to be generic Dragon Ball Z fireballs (and the ability to create barriers, which is something I had never once drawn him doing), he is now a flame manipulator, or something.
Of note, the character my brother used for his extremely blatant self insert was also a fire user. I think it was just generally socially acceptable to have your main character use fire in the 2000's era of western children drawing their own anime. Flame of Recca was getting popular in my friend's circle, so this was a forgone conclusion.
youtube
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Spring 2002
THOUGHTS: Every great comic has some cute animal characters!
Hitting a wall on how much I could appreciate and represent the human figure, I decided to branch out into the vast realm of animals. On top of the male/female transformation for Pylon, I think there might have been some phase in which he turned into one of these retched looking things on the right image. Looking back through my childhood there is a great deal of this desire to be forcibly transformed into another form as a """"bad"""" circumstance. There's nothing more to extrapolate on that for now, it's just an observation.
Anyway, I remember very distinctly having the inspiration to have a cute mascot animal likely stemming from the anime I had been watching at the time.
There's a haunting quality to these beasts I have created. If they were made into hyper-realistic sculptures and filmed in a dark room, they would do numbers on an analog horror series. The fact that they are not quite animals and possess human facial features as well as seemingly human hands really gives them this uncanny look.
Down the line, I will take an interest in more depictions of animal/human hybrid characters. But in 2002, the child me hasn't found out about the furry fandom...
YET.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Winter/Spring 2002
THOUGHTS: A renewed interest in drawing girls!
I don't know if this is a common thing, but at this point in my life, I had an extremely difficult time drawing female characters without getting all flushed. I cannot really explain a root to the sensation that I felt I was doing something wrong when I would express femininity through my pencil, but it makes a lot of the early drawings of girls I've done feel special and personal to me. I don't know if my relationship with the feminine characters and the feelings I had felt through creating them and expressing myself through them was indicative of some sort of gender euphoria that was buried deep within, or I was just sort of shy about anything dealing with girls in general. I'm willing to make a lot of suppositions for the sake of giving my story context, but I cannot account for the rush of hormones at the time and really explain how my kid self felt.
One such female character I had always billed as a potential love interest for Pylon was a blue haired woman named Fria/Freya. I really could not keep it consistent. She was loosely- and I mean that- loosely based off of a girl I had a crush on in 5th grade. The nature of that crush as I think back on it was largely performative because I was jealous of a girlfriend my brother had.
While I don't know if I have a lot to say about her, I will say that I did take a couple cracks at her design in various outfits and levels of fanciness. Her common outfit was a parka jacket of some sort. She had ice powers, so yaknow.
Also of note: both the drawings from later are probably from a similar time (maybe 2005-2006?). The 'JC' initials and the phrase REDO indicate a desire I had years later to revisit these pieces and attempt to make them much better than how they were. This theme of trying to reinvent concepts I created as a child will be present through the "REDOs" and various other reprisals of themes and character designs.
As for who "JC" is? Well, this is a pen name that will present itself soon enough in another book.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Winter 2002
THOUGHTS: The official ref sheet for Pylon!
The school year rolled on, and I think I must have had most of my drawing going on in my notebooks as I both had terrible marks in my first year of middle school and very little drawings done in the last few months of the year. The history gets a little spotty here, but I don't recall filling this book out until the summer of 2002.
I had done a little bit of practicing, and frankly, the nicest thing I can say about my progress here is that I started to respect the human skeleton a little in my work. The side face and ponytail- if I remember correctly- was drawn by my brother in an effort to show me how to improve. A lot of times he would just kind of show me how to draw something by effortlessly drawing it better than I could at the time. This is not his fault, but it did frustrate me!
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Fall 2001
THOUGHTS: I have been inspired by a new era of entertainment. (The absolutely not horrific images of the Aqua Teens were drawn by my brother)
Growing up in the early 2000's bears mentioning that entertainment- notably animation- was entering a turbulent but sprawling new age. The advent of Macromedia Flash led to the establishment and eventual popular use of online content monoliths such as Newgrounds and AlbinoBlackSheep which beamed unruly and largely undermoderated content to anyone with a stable internet connection. Suddenly, a generation of creators and viewers alike got to establish a relationship in a way previous methods of entertainment hadn't done yet. It was edgy, unrefined, and oftentimes juvenile, and we loved it for that.
In 2001 Cartoon Network launched an experimental new programming block which was showing programs intended for older audiences. Today, we know Adult Swim as a venue for extremely high quality original programs as well as a great way to catch a couple episodes of Family Guy, but its beginnings could only be called 'humble.' Much like Newgrounds, Adult Swim's original lineup was less focused on polish and budget, but allowed itself to be distinct in its desire to push boundaries.
I saw Aqua Teen Hunger Force as a kid who had never seen anything remotely like it before and- like any modern fine artists work-had a few creative thoughts that went something to the tune of "This looks like trash and barely animates, but it is SO good! Maybe I could do something like this, too!"
Shogun Fun was a flash series I made with all of my blood sweat and tears. It looked like trash and barely animated. There was exactly one 45 second episode made and featured my brother as the exclusive voice actor. It was the entry point for me learning to use Flash, and it was removed from Newgrounds within a day of its posting. I got off extremely easily in that I don't have the original short to show on here since it was on a 20 year old Compaq that is in a trash hole somewhere.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS: Time to give my old classic OC a coat of fresh paint!
Before Pylon, I had developed a little robot guy named "Cyborg Beta." I'm pretty sure his story was a mixture of Mega Man and The Powerpuff Girls. I hadn't really tried taking drawing seriously at the time I had been imagining stories about him, so a lot of the early drawings are entirely lost in 5th grade notebooks. As we go through here, you'll notice he gets redesigned or redrawn every now and then. In fact, you can see two separate attempts to redraw him on this very page by older incarnations of myself.
It is interesting to see this guy get so much reverence from my younger selves as kind of a throwback character to try and draw. I wonder if I looked back on him for his simplicity and the joy I felt creating Beta and convince myself that I was just not artistically ready to bring him into the spotlight- or something.
In fact, just thinking about it makes me want to do a redesign...
This drawing is more significant in that it marks the end of the Summer of 2001. We had actually had a longer summer due to a teacher strike and so this summer vacation actually lasted until mid September- (which interestingly enough, means most of the work I had posted so far predates 9/11.)
Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" lineup was days from premiering on TV, and I was starting middle school, a kid on the cusp of the wrong puberty ready to embrace my new identity as an art kid. With work looking like this, I was extremely confident I would be one of the best artists at my school. What could possibly go wrong?
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Various- 2001, 2004(?), 2009
THOUGHTS: After weeks of planning, it's time for me to start writing a comic!
Though I had unceremoniously posted a comic page previously, I wanted to highlight this page as the first of many- many attempts at utilizing the medium of sequential fiction.
First off, the title "We have lift off! #1 the begging" is about as good an opener as an 11 year old me could have come up with, but what's even better is the 14(?) year old me coming in and calmly correcting their spelling by also misspelling the word 'beginning'. You can't make up this sort of creative discourse.
The comic itself covers absolutely no ground narratively. It establishes that we are on earth and that 4 kids and a robot's life is about to change 'in a rad new way.' I guess I kind of hadn't figured out where to go from there?
At the bottom is my mature older (18 year old) self commenting using their current favorite OC 'Katrina' (you'll see a lot of her sooner than you think) about both the lack of effort put into this maiden voyage of the "Pylon space harem comic" and the odor of this (at the time) 8 year old drawing book. At least they kept it cordial this time.
A bit of a false start, but certainly not the last attempt at a comic.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS: Bishounen, thy name is Pylon!
I remember being influenced by a friend of my brother's. Seeing their portrait work (still in a very anime style- mind you) inspired me to pull together everything I had been doing to try and really go for a work of high fineness and effort.
The result is hilariously naïve and is a textbook example of the type of anime styled art teenage girls fill their notebooks with, but it is no stretch to say I really broke out of a comfort zone with this piece.
I pulled the camera in way close up compared to the "full body shots in the middle of a huge white page" I had been doing before in order to do a proper portrait of this handsome boy. Many of the facial features were being tweaked to fall more in line with the inspiring style and definitely takes a more shōjo approach with everything from the sparkle in the eyes to even the attempt to add a little femme flair with the earring.
Also of note is the return to color! There's even a background (kinda)! I think clearly my younger self knew this picture was a big deal and a pivotal moment in their growth as an artist.
You may start to notice some notes cropping up in the "LV6" and sideways "B." As I've said before: throughout my life, I have returned to these books and added my own little notes here and there. On two separate occasions I had taken it upon myself to give my work a letter grade to show to myself that I had improved since I had started. This practice goes up until Book 3, I think. This is similar with the "LV" level up system I had been using, I guess.
It's a little cringey to think I was so insecure about my work that I self evaluated in this weird nebulously quantifiable way. However, in a way I am glad to see proof that my younger self agreed that with this drawing, my even younger self had definitely "Leveled Up."
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
ART ROUNDUP #1
Rather than do a breakdown of these images, I just wanted to share them as supplemental drawings that are worth sharing, but not exactly worth saying much that hasn't already been said in a previous post.
I'll try to do a roundup now and again, because I do think they serve to hammer in certain themes and motifs that were prevalent for this era of my studies. The incomprehensible comic in particular amuses me to no end.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS: The wickedest action scene I could muster at the time! So cool!!! Dragon. Ball. Z!
There comes a point where I flipped through this drawing book with hundreds of drawings in it and started to note that back in 2001 I filled this shit up lightning fast. Tons of scattershot ideas and attempts to adapt what was going on in my life to a storytelling medium I could have fun playing in. While I could share every half made design or DBZ inspired scene, I'd basically just be saying the same thing over and over.
I picked this one to showcase for two reasons:
The first is that the opponent in this scene is very obviously a Cell knockoff. The Cell Games arc was happening on Toonami in the west at this time, so I was just gulping down obvious design influences. Other than his obvious inspiration... this character never appears again or is adapted into anything else down the line. It was almost as if I had wanted to just have literally any generic mook take a deadly "black ball attack" to the face.
Speaking of that, I would like to also note the fact that I can piece together the context of this little scene as somewhat of a dramatic rescue. To me, Not-Cell is rushing towards the downed girl (Who I believe is Katie Psychicgirl from another post). Before he can deliver a fatal blow, the man among men Pylon rushes in and delivers an unguarded and devastating special attack!
I think it is interesting to see my childhood self starting to make intellectual choices on composition in order to convey action, even if it is primitive and static.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS BACK THEN: Elf! Proportions?
THOUGHTS NOW: Is it problematic to include arrows in the logo design for the world "Elf?"
As I've stated before, I had some interest in there being an Elf race in this sprawling space adventure story I was cooking up. Besides the pointy ears, though, I'm not really sure what else this entailed. The focus of this image appeared to be producing some sort of proportion system? I think I had heard it was a thing cartoonists did and tried to imitate that without really understanding how it really worked.
My favorite thing about this image is the 2000's era printed buttonup he was wearing. I had one that was just like it with wild patterns and waves and stuff on it and in middle school it was my "lookin cool" shirt.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Summer 2001
THOUGHTS: I'm learning to draw girls!
I'm going to address the very small elephant in the middle of the page first and foremost. The inspiration for this drawing is 1000% in the English opening to Sailor Moon:
That out of the way. By some circumstance- I had planned a storyline in which Pylon is turned into a girl against his will (think a Ranma 1/2 situation for you anime fans I hope to god are reading this). One way or another, he was to turn between a masculine and feminine form in a manner that I'm pretty sure was not in his control. This would have comedic circumstances and really give me room to explore the pressing question of "what if I had breasts?" that I'm sure every preteen boy was thinking about constantly and expressing through their art.
Pylon is staring off, conflicted at his new fractured identity, who looks back at him assuredly, making her a sort of guardian identity for the two of them.
Rather than go on any longer about the deeper meaning of this picture, I'll say "This remains a theme for decades worth of drawings" and "Yes! I do come out as trans along the way."
To contrast the highly thoughtful gender discourse of the top image, I made sure to include this giant boobed woman with hearts for eyes. I think this characters name is "Deena." Other than that, there is absolutely no context for this I can remember, sorry.
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BOOK: #1
DATE: Multiple (2001-2008(?))
THOUGHTS: Chibis! They're the best aren't they!?
It is difficult to go through all of this all at the same time. It is worth noting this is a feature that will be happening once in awhile in which I revisit pages I did later on and add a new drawing to show off my new style. This was maybe a flex by my younger self at my even younger self but also just a way to see how far I've come.
Since this is kind of a smorgasbord, I will try to clip certain parts to discuss:
Section 1 is what I call "the first attempt." My best guess for the inspiration to draw chibis was the "Welcome to Loddoss Island!" shorts at the end of episodes of the Record of Loddoss War TV series.
At any rate, I was eager to try the seemingly easier to work with chibi style (though it appears here I call them SD's for "Super-Deformed." I wonder if we leaned away from that phrasing for a reason...) Here are my precious OC's being cute and, of course, holding hands and fighting over each other. Note the top left corner which has Pylon drowning in women. It was 2001 and the harem anime was in full swing over in the USA. Not sorry.
Section 2 was done maybe a few days later. More of the same business going on here. This is probably the first place a lot of these characters were actually ever drawn into a sketchbook rather than just made from a hasty Megaman sprite edit from my imagination. I promise I'll try to give more background on these characters as they become the subject of drawings. The top image of the space police woman shooting at what appears to be Pylon set up on a target for some kind of trickshooting goes extremely hard and I am 100% here for it.
Section 3 is a compilation of things I call "the comments section." Years later I would return to this page and channel the sheer cringe bloodlust I was feeling looking at these pictures I drew as an 11 Year old and attempt to show off my new style using phrases like "I am so much cooler than you guys" and "No I own" (It was 2005. It was cool to say things "owned." Once again: not sorry.)
As you may or may not notice, there are a few of these that are cat and dog people. This is foreshadowing.
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