Artist Journal - 2022 to April 2023

Today we'll be talking about my general thoughts, progress and work as an artist I've done between 2022 and 2023.

Art Progress

As for 2022, I made 36 artworks. I was unhappy with a lot of my work, and I found it very uneasy to improve. All I was thinking of when I drew was content and got into that 'something-to-post' mindset. No matter how many tutorials I watched or other artists I studied, I felt stuck.

The main factors I believed were messing up the artwork were the lack of depth, appropriate colour usage and interesting perspective. Regardless, I didn't know how to improve on those things. I just kept trying different ways, however, I could never consistently get that feeling.

N1: Qiqi, N3: Tighnari, N2: Nilou - all the characters are from Genshin Impact (I know, I am a chronic Genshin player at this point)

There are several artworks I was happy with, which were the ones where I worked with dark tones and lighting (for some reason, it's a lot easier to achieve that depth with dark shading, while on the other hand daylight shading is really difficult and I can't figure out why). One thing I learnt in 2022 is to stop rushing my artwork. That also was a huge factor in why my work looked messy and flat.

N1: Zhongli from Genshin Impact, N2: Captain Harlock, N3: Jin Yuyao from Dislyte

Fast forward to 2023, and I still feel this way. At the time of writing, I've made four artworks. I'm really trying to get over this learning curve, but I've changed my mindset back to before when creating art and made this a lot more enjoyable. Last year I was trying to rush my progress and compare myself to other artists, and that built a tonne of frustration again as to why I wasn't improving. Now I've reminded myself of the original reason why I started drawing - for my own enjoyment. Even if not many see my work, that's alright. I appreciate those who do, but I won't dwell on it.

It's sometimes easy to forget this, and I get dragged into the bottomless pit of emotions.

N1: Chun Li from Street Fighter, N2: Shylily (Vtuber) N3: Eunho from PLAVE

This year, I hope to get over this learning curve, and finally, nail the depth in my work regardless of its light or dark lighting. I'm currently doing greyscales to colour (an example is my drawing of Eunho above) and studies alongside.

'Babel' from Genshin Impact, check out the speed paint here

One artwork that I was SUPER happy with is my fanart of a Genshin Impact NPC, this turned out in every way I wanted. The depth, perspective, and shading - were on point with everything I was envisioning in my mind. To this day, this is one of my favourite artworks!

Webtoon (When the Moon Ate the Stars)

2022 was a normal year for my comic. One thing I would say is that I didn't do so well in keeping with my schedule and had to go on hiatus twice. Even in 2023, I'm struggling to keep up to date and post regularly, so I'm going on hiatus again after I publish episode 74. I wish I could have done better, but I've been very preoccupied with other matters, and unfortunately could not keep up. From now, I do not know if I ever can, and may have frequent hiatuses (e.g., every 6 months).

In episode 73, an upcoming update, you will see a giant change and upgrade in formatting style. I was becoming uninterested in the normal square-to-square storytelling method, so I decided to freshen it up.

In addition, I used to work frame by frame (so each frame will be a separate file). Now, I've changed to doing two or three frames, which gives me a lot more freedom in panelling styles.

I find this method is actually more efficient than my previous one. I guess because I'm working on panels as batches (so I do all the line art of that file, then the next step together), it's easier for my brain to process.

If I'm honest, since 2019, I have been completely focused on promoting my comic and getting more subs and views, in hopes to make money out of my comic soon enough. I made YouTube videos on my comic in hopes more people will read my work.

Now, in 2023, April. Completely given up on promoting, and all I want now is just to write and finish a story that showcases my art and writing skills as they develop. When the Moon Ate the Stars was my love-hate child (because to me my art and storytelling skills before episode 65 were… not so great), but now I've come to love it. It is a very flawed story with many aspects I could have improved a lot on, but without making mistakes like that, I wouldn't have gotten to where I am now.

My current webcomic page and stats - surprisingly, my rating is pretty high (don't @ me for liking my own episodes, I need some self-validation)

I'm quite positive that because of all these very prominent faulty traits of my webcomic, it will be very difficult to get new readers engaged and want to read it. This reality would have hurt my younger self a lot. I believe When the Moon Ate Stars will never get past 1k readers (at most I think it can reach 400-500 readers), and will never be seen in a large spotlight.

Regardless, I'm really thankful for the people who pick up my story and still read it. Hopefully, some people out there can find the story entertaining at the very least.

YouTube

It is absolutely incredible, especially for a small random artist like myself that the 'Algorithm God' chose a tutorial video of mine - which at this time has 29k views, and pushed my subs past 1k. I'm so glad that my tutorials could be of help to many people, and I thank you for giving me your time to look at my work.

In my previous blog, I mentioned that my average view count was about 20 views per video. Then, my tutorials would often be a little higher, like 50 (more or so…). So when I first uploaded my first tutorial which pushed past 1k views in mid-March (which was insane at the time considering I usually get, it took 2 months to suddenly go up to 1k.

Closely following the upload of my first tutorial I posted my second tutorial, which also did very well at the same.

Mind you, I didn't have any social media platform (or money) to advertise my work. I just uploaded and left it, not expecting anything. These two videos pushed me past the very difficult line past 100 subscribers. I keep saying this, but for someone with almost no online presence, this is amazing.

The current status of my Youtube channel - its doing very well and I'm very happy with it

After these two videos, I went on a spree of posting more tutorials. Including the Manhwa style tutorial with now 29,000 views, these were the main videos that really helped me climb up to the 1k sub achievement.

Link to the tutorial here if you are interested in checking it out!

Conclusion

So, after my rambling, here's my conclusion. If I want to get more attention for my work from rock bottom (and no nepotism… just kidding), it's all just pure luck. But, my YouTube channel is doing very well number-wise, and I'm very happy with that. I also gained a lot of acceptance for the reality of my work and feel a lot more at peace with it. I'm not making any bucks off my creative work (and I may never in my life), but at this point, I lost the energy to care anymore. It might be considered a waste of time then, but at least, I died doing what I loved, hehe.

Thanks for reading.