A decade of digital art

The oldest digital drawing I have on my computer turns ten years old today. This post is a self-indulgent trip down memory lane, looking back at landmark pieces and lessons learned throughout the years.

2015§

I was 18 years old. I'd never done much drawing aside from a brief period in middle school where I wanted to draw Donald Duck comics. Now I had decided I want to learn to draw so I can make graphics for games. The very first thing I made was a pixel art mole for a profile picture, one that I kept using for quite a few years:

The nice thing about low-resolution pixel art like this is that you can kind of brute-force it by swapping pixels around until it looks alright, but I wanted to really learn to draw. So I bought a tablet, downloaded GnuIMP, and started scribbling some awful fanart of one of Vi's silly outfits from Wings of Vi (a fun precision platformer I was speedrunning at the time).

I didn't manage to do much beyond this before I was conscripted for military service (as every Finnish man of the age is) and dropped the hobby for the rest of the year.

2016§

My military service ended slightly prematurely with a testicular cancer diagnosis. In the summer while I was (successfully) undergoing chemotherapy, I started trying to make drawings again. I learned about basic construction of the human body, took some clumsy attempts at exercising it,

and painted this Christmas greeting card, which would later become quite a long-lasting tradition.

I also made some "mole" emotes for Discord, which went on to become surprisingly popular in certain communities (shoutout to the I Wanna Be the Guy and N++ folks, many of whom I'm still friends with to this day).

2017§

Up until the end of October 2017 I was only drawing sporadically and making very little progress. That was the point where I decided to really take this hobby seriously and make a habit of drawing something every day. I bought a big sketchbook and filled its 160 pages by the end of the year, mostly with figure drawings and study sketches of art I liked. I also tried a bit of digital painting, including this self-portrait

and another, much more successful greeting card.

2018§

I continued to do a lot of sketchbook figure drawing, and it was starting to pay off a little — my drawings were starting to get more accurate with a basic sense of perspective and structure.

This self-portrait was so good for the time I've even featured it in the gallery section on this website.

2019§

I didn't do much digital art in 2019. I don't entirely remember why, but I suspect I was just mostly preoccupied with programming. I only have two finished works from this year, plus a few unfinished project files I have no memory of and no easy access to (because I was using Clip Studio Paint at the time, which doesn't run on my current Linux setup).

This was a submission for the graphic art compo at local demoparty Instanssi, made by drawing over a nonogram from a puzzle magazine, and surprisingly won third place.

This one was my first artwork for Mermay, a social media event I've since participated in every year.

2020§

Another somewhat slow year, but with some big highlights. At this point we're reaching work I still like enough of to keep in the gallery.

This Mermay piece was a huge step up in my lineart skills and semi-accidentally also pretty nicely composed and painted.

I also made another attempt at a self-portrait, which again stepped up my painting skills. This one finally replaced my mole profile picture from 2015 and also introduced Very Thick Outlines, a style feature I then proceeded to take a little too far.

2021§

In 2021 I did a lot of exploration with more stylized ways of drawing, such as this experiment in a flat style for video game purposes inspired by The King's Bird,

and this tree, which felt like a breakthrough of sorts at the time, although I later realized I hadn't actually learned as much from it as I thought I had.

2022§

Now we're getting to some really productive years. In January I made this fanart of Isidora from Blasphemous, where I was very proud of the level of detail and subtle perspective.

I then stepped up the level of detail even further with this Elden Ring fanart piece.

However, the real revelation came when I joined a Discord community called Art Corner where I asked for feedback on my work for the first time. The responses from the wonderful folks there taught me that I didn't understand the role of value in lighting and composition at all, and resulted in this piece which is still one of my favorites.

Remember in 2017 when I started drawing every day? I was still doing it in 2022, but at the end of the year I finally gave up the habit after a little over five years without missing a day. I believe that habit was crucial in carrying me past the struggles of early learning and into a stage where drawing is consistently fun and rewarding.

2023§

With so many works I still like, there's a temptation to make this post very long, but I'll keep it to a few highlights.

This one pushed the scale of my environments further than ever and has a certain peaceful yet grand mood that influenced my later work in a big way. The character didn't have a deeper story at the time but later turned into a prototypical Miriel.

This Diablo IV fanart piece was an extremely successful attempt at a completely different style, and a first step in a more coarsely textured direction.

Finally, I participated in Inktober for the first time and discovered a love for ink which really blossomed in 2024.

2024§

By far my most prolific year hitherto recorded. I made fifty ink drawings, incorporated demoscene-style computer graphics into my work, started a worldbuilding project where I designed some of my first real characters with actual backstories, experimented with style, and spent a lot of time studying landscapes, color and light.

2025§

And that brings us to present day! I'm quite proud of my progress, happy I discovered this hobby and pushed through the hard times, and looking forward to the next decade of making and learning.

I mostly wrote this post for my own enjoyment, but I hope it might serve as a reminder that what people call "talent" is actually just being very interested in a thing and doing a lot of work. Anybody can learn to draw, it just takes years of effort (good learning methods and teachers are a must though — years of aimless scribbling will just make you good at aimless scribbling). There's tons of free education about art fundamentals available on the internet. Give it a try if you're interested at all! Learning to draw is quite possibly the most rewarding thing I've done in my entire life and I hope more people get to experience it.