I really love the art style I had back in 2016-2017. The ideas I had for my david’s gate comic were quite raw; with minimal writing put into them, I mainly just aimed at a specific type of feeling in my art; it is a feeling I captured quite well early in the 2017 comic too. Despite these outdated ideas, I’ll definitely pick up my old traditional tools again. If i’ve improved in the writing department as much as I hope, maybe I can give the feelings I was aiming for in these works some real purpose in future comics.

[2023 review]

Some of my first sketches of david as an idea.
I was going for a young, cheerful and adventurous personality.

[31-Jan-16]

Random doodles, and some girls, I ended up liking one and tried to find some appealing consistency, called her Erica. Never did much with her though.

[07-Feb-16]

I was a bit hung up on trying to “find a style” for a while, my general aim was at something I could look at and feel it was capturing features that felt the most expressive to me, I think this is the point where things were beginning to click a bit more. Still very unrefined but, I saw a direction.

It’s a bit strange looking back at these. Back in 2015 I thought I was quite a good artist, and a lot of my peers recognised me as such. I could draw and make up these detailed monsters from imagination, and my shading ability at its best was pretty photorealistic, but when I tried to draw actual character faces from imagination, and from different angles, I was shocked at how terrible I actually was. Despite how these look, It was good to see the progress from 2015 to 2016 back then.