Aside from gift art and art trades, my digital art is purely a fun hobby of self-satisfaction. Up til now I mostly do simple illustrative character art, but I’ve lately been trying to branch out into digital painting and comics.

Technique and Tools

After a fair bit of experimentation I’ve settled pretty hard on my simple drawing setup:

• iPad Pro (currently a 2018 model)
• Apple Pencil
• Paperlike screen protector
• Procreate drawing app

And then a case or stand for the iPad but this isn’t too important.

As for technique, my style is primarily illustrative, but I’ve been dabbling in painting lately.

Art Fight

Every year in July I participate in Art Fight, a really cool annual art-trading event. It’s a fun thing I do with friends, but it’s also consistently served to push my artistic limits and encourage experimentation.
I’m pretty inconsistent with my art output, but Art Fight is the one real exception since it’s a time-limited event.

Art Fight Faves

You can check out my whole profile on the site here (my art are those listed as “attacks”), but I’ll also share a few of my favorites.

Art Eras

Aside from a few halfway attempts at traditional art in high school (mostly drawing dragons and guns from Halo), I’d say I really started drawing in 2014.

2014

Back in 2014 I was not only a Brony, I was vice-president of my university Brony Club. Getting so deep into it that the urge to create and “contribute” to the fandom became overwhelming. Somehow that meant landing on digital art.
Courtesy of my younger sister who won a contest and never cared to use it, I had a brand new iPad at my disposal.¹ I bought the insanely good iPad art app Procreate for $5, and started drawing My Little Pony characters with my fingertip on my iPad, often sitting in cafes in my university downtown.

Princess Celestia

My first ever fully-finished digital art piece I think says a lot about me lol. It’s a portrait of the matronly godlike pony character from the show, Princess Celestia. I distinctly remember a few things about working on this:

1. It is all one layer–I either didn’t have access to, or didn’t know how to use layers in this program yet. So this is MS Paint level of drawing on top of mistakes etc.
2. I spent at least a full week on this.
3. I was so so so proud of it afterwards. I think just a year later I made a follow-up “redraw” of it. My first “finished” digital art piece: Portrait of Celestia

Amazingly I didn’t even have to dig for this. I’ve saved nearly every piece of art I’ve ever made in cloud storage somewhere.

Protip: Do this. Save everything. Personal digital art storage is cheap, so no matter how ‘cringe’, you should save your art. Future you will thank you.

2015 - 2019

I lump these 4 or so years together because I didn’t make many huge strides in my art skill. I drew frequently enough, but I wasn’t fully passionate about what I was drawing up until about 2019 when I really began to get into my Original Characters (OCs)².
This period is also when I moved over from Brony and MLP content into general Furry art. Apple had also come out with the apple pencil by now, so iPad art was only getting better and better as apps and techniques improved.

Art from the Texas Era

Here are a few pieces from this ‘era’ of mine (I lived in Texas for most of it):

This guy was my favorite background character in the show Undertale Good Dyrim was my first OC I really fell in love with. This is probably the 2nd time I ever drew her. Less than a year later, I got much better at drawing her. Also TRANS RIGHTS!!!

2019-2023

This is the latest major ‘era’ of art for me, due to life events. In this period I really branched out, tried new things, and connected with various new artist friends who helped me grow my skills and style.

Argent and the Buff Boys

In 2019 I was encouraged to make a real fursona, instead of just using Dyrim.³ Designing and drawing Argent helped me realise how much I loved drawing muscles and muscle anatomy. This Era is punctuated with so so much muscular gay furry art.

The very first Argent art piece