Artist Journal - 2023 to May 2025

Thoughts and progress on my art as an artist from 2023 to May 2025

2023 

Continuing from my last artist journal from April 2023 (you can view it here), I made another four artworks (excluding casual or informal artworks) later in the year. From this point on, I felt my art has now begun stabilizing in art style and progress. 

Yejun from PLAVE

Kafka from Honkai Star Rail

Natasha from Honkai Star Rail

N1: Yejun (PLAVE), N2: Kafka (Honkai Star Rail) N3: Natasha (Honkai Star Rail)

I’m not sure why Natasha is bandaging a creature, but I wanted to draw a subject that was a bit ‘odd’ to pique my own curiosity. 

Furina from Genshin Impact

My favourite artwork out of the four artworks is my work on Furina, a character from Genshin Impact. 

One pet-peeve I couldn’t get past was rendering gold materials. No matter how many times I practised, I just couldn’t seem to wrap my head around it. Here, the gold looks a bit too ‘light’, jarring from the rest of the clothes. Now that I look at it, the gold needs darker shades to match.

2024 

In 2024, I didn’t make any artworks, as I was fully focused on getting my webcomic series When the Moon Ate the Stars done. 

2025 

Earlier in the year, I finally had more time to spend on work other than my comic series. So far, I’ve made three formal artworks, all based on characters from Honkai Star Rail. 

Mydeimos from Honkai Star Rail

Anaxa from Honkai Star Rail

Oti Alfalfa 'Old Oti' from Honkai Star Rail

N1: Mydeimos N2: Anaxa N3: Oti Alfalfa (Honkai Star Rail)

I found myself still struggling with basic anatomy - especially when it came to hands and perspectives.

In May 2025, after completing When the Moon Ate the Stars, I finally realised how much this gap in my anatomy knowledge was costing me time wise. I often had to fix or redraw the body as the whole thing looked off. Up until then, I never formally studied nor practised anatomy. 

I wasn’t able to understand how muscles and parts of the body worked together. It was all guess work.

A while ago I also began studying languages formally, and found that to learn new vocabulary, using recall methods (like spaced repetition) then reading texts including the words I’ve learnt really drilled them into memory. In my previous attempts to study anatomy, I didn’t have any ‘struggle’ - I simply copied down anatomy references and called it a day. 

From May 2025, while following Pikat’s tutorial (which was extremely helpful in structuring my practice) I jumped straight into the ‘recall’ method, as reflecting on my language learning experiences, felt this would be the most effective. 

For the references, I chose Pose Maniacs.  

Similar to Pikat’s ‘Ultimate Pose Practise’ my study routine was as it follows:

1. View the reference

2. Put away the ref, and try to replicate it by memory 

3. View the ref again, and compare it to my replication attempt

4. While viewing, redraw the ref

5. Move on to the next ref practice and repeat steps 1 to 4

6. Revisit the previous ref and repeat steps 1 to 4 

At first, all I saw was a jumbled mess of random muscles and parts. How will I ever remember all these muscles and how they work together? Why is the human body so complicated? 

But I also met this challenge in studying languages - at first nothing made sense, and it was frustrating. How can I be so sure I’m actually learning if I don’t understand anything? 

Despite that, I kept going thanks to my strong belief that ‘recalling’ will somehow work as linguists seem to recommend (paired with immersion, shadowing, output, etc.). Now, after a long-time persevering through my constant frustration, I am finally able to see the whole picture of the languages. When I listen to audios, read, etc., it's not all alien to me anymore. I can see why the person says that in that way, or why they used that word instead.

With this experience, I believed it would be the same with learning anatomy. 

Surprisingly, after just three hours, I was already able to correct many anatomy mistakes I made in my webcomic When the Moon Ate the Stars.

Here is the improvement I was able to achieve after the three hours (I only focused on editing my character Auden in this frame).

From Episode 96, When the Moon Ate the Stars 

Of course, I’m not perfect yet - this is only the beginning. I will continue to practise.

Thanks for reading!