In 2013, when I was about 16 or 17 years old and obsessed with all the little memes that popped up, especially the ones I could plug my art into, I came across one that had you put in an image that you drew for each of the twelve months, effectively creating a lens through which you could view your progress over that year. It was a little tricky to find all the art I could put in and make sure it corresponded to the correct months, but I made it work! And it was so exciting to see the progress I’d made. The next year in 2014, I hunted down the meme template again to put everything together. It occurred to me then that I was about to leave to go to art school, and what could possibly improve your drawing skills more than that? I had to keep doing this meme every year so I could look back on my progress and see how far I’ve come. I was going to do this meme for the next ten years.

High School

To me, this is the kind of art you wish you had destroyed all traces of. Not because I think it looks bad, in fact I’m really impressed with how well I was drawing then. The issue is that it’s all Hetalia fanart or fanart of friends’ hetalia OCs (alongside a couple pieces that were technical practice). In fact, more than fanart, a lot of these are updates I made for character askblogs I ran on Tumblr. It’s my previous taste that I have issues with, but it’s important history regardless, and we have to be honest with the people we previously were while simultaneously acknowledging that the series that makes comedy out of the Axis Powers during WWII was and is bad for many reasons, so here it stays! The last few images of 2014 were actually made in college, the November 2014 piece being inspired by one of my class assignments which fared far worse than the art I made based off of it. Don’t actually know what became of that piece.

College

I’ve always loved looking at my jump from 2014 to 2015. I refer to it as college me finally kicking off. It’s where I start to lose my muddy, overly soft shading and get bold and bright with the colors. If I have a personal style, this is where I finally got to developing it. Starting in 2015, I was putting these together throughout the year rather than digging through everything I’d drawn in December, which made it easier to remember when I drew things, but also put on some pressure when I realized I didn’t have much to fill the space in a given month, and this pressure grew into more of an issue as time went on. For whatever reason, January, February, and August always ended up being the hardest spaces to fill.

In between the various college assignments and commissioned pieces that got thrown in to fill space, you can see pretty clearly the things I got into and out of over the time. The Hetalia is replaced by Steven Universe which quickly gets swamped by Undertale, followed by a break into The Adventure Zone, and then more Undertale, though in this case specifically longer comics I was working on rather than one-off fanart.

Post-Graduation

This section would probably be renamed to something like “working years” had I gotten a job directly out of college like I had wanted to. Had I managed that, most of my work would probably have been storyboards trapped under non-disclosure agreements that I wouldn’t be able to share for years, so for the purposes of this meme, that at least worked out. Instead, the work that I did was mostly commissions and small contracts which for whatever reason I wanted nothing more than to keep off of these memes. Maybe I thought that work done on contract would betray my “style” and not fit in. You can see the result of that line of thought immediately in December of 2019 though, where there isn’t art. I did have a picture I did for work that I put in later, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t find that version for this. By 2021, I firmly gave up on that idea and you can see three different contracted pieces.

In 2019, I kept myself occupied while looking for work by taking part in five different fanzines, and organizing a sixth that I didn’t make art for. You can also see the appearance of some of the first concept art I made for the farming sim I’m trying to make with my partner that we call “Farm Game” for lack of better name. The September piece is one I credit with getting me at least three different jobs, none of which (irritatingly) requested I work in a style even remotely similar to the piece.

In 2020, we see the first appearance of my foray into 3D art, and in 2021 the meme starts to truly fall apart. My inability to find stable work mixed with the long and arduous task of learning everything about making 3D art and how long it takes to MAKE the art resulted in a struggle to put anything into the template. I was making a million things at once, nothing was finished, and nothing looked good. This meme was supposed to show how far my art had come, and to me it looked like a hot mess. I was nearly done with my 10 year stint, in fact for a moment I thought this was actually the 10th piece. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to keep up this trend for another year.

Now

And here we are in 2022, with little professional work to show and a smattering of 3D spread out alongside some underwhelming concept and design pieces. At least, it’s how it feels to me looking at it now. But the thing is, that’s just how it looks when constrained to this very, very limiting meme.

While the format can be handy for showing improvement in snapshots of 2D art, and still images at that, it can’t show how well I’ve learned to rig and animate a 3D model, how I’ve managed to put a character and scene made all by myself into a game engine where you’re able to functionally move around. It doesn’t show how much faster I’ve gotten at modeling, or how many smaller things I’ve made. It doesn’t even show the breadth of the larger pieces presented here because the viewing window is so small. Even in the past, I struggled with not being able to show things like the paneling work I did for comics because it simply wouldn’t come across. This meme can’t show the ways I’ve grown as an artist this year, in fact, I don’t think it’s shown my technical improvement as an artist for a while now. As painful as it became for me to do as an ill-fitted method of self-reflection in the past couple of years, I’m glad I was still able to keep up with it for the full decade I promised myself so I’m able to look back and see my journey organized in such a tidy pattern. If I ever want to see it, the messier version is still out there anyways.

The Future

I don’t know whether or not I’ll continue doing this meme in years to come. At this point, it’s something I do pretty impulsively, so I think the chances are likely. I only hope that without the pressure of having to do it for 10 years straight expecting big improvement every time, it won’t make me feel like I have to draw something amazing every single month, and feel bad when that doesn’t happen.

What makes it less likely that I continue with this is the fact that my future plans involve a lot of animation–something you’d have to pay me to try compiling into a format like this. Additionally, I’m getting more into learning Unreal Engine, in fact I’ve come across a series of classes on youtube that I’ve started following, so even if I still struggle to find a proper job for myself working on games, I can at least try to make my own! I’ll also be getting back to monthly models voted on over at my Patreon account once I’m back to my wonderful desktop computer that’s able to handle Blender, and similarly I’ll be reopening my Your-Character-Here series of 3D commissions alongside offers of custom low-poly characters made from scratch.

I want to work hard and make 2023 a year I can be proud of! Let’s make this the year my 3D kicks off!