While I have never posted directly onto a public art account on social media for all to see, I have been involved in the online art community since I was about eleven. Ever since I signed onto social media with personal accounts, I have been following the journey of numerous artists. Now that it’s been a good eight years, I find it amazing to be able to see the progress of some of these artists, but to also know that I was able to experience their growth in real time. One artist that I have been following since I started taking art seriously is Laura Brouwers, who is better known by her Instagram handle, @cyarine. 

When I was younger, I looked up to her art style and wished that I could have made art the way she did. I was in love with the way she posed her characters– there was almost this playful fluidity to it. Furthermore, she had this painterly style while still keeping the feel of line work, and that style was something I desperately wanted to be capable of.

When I started following her online, she did a lot of OOTD, or outfit of the day, drawings. She would draw her outfit in a more stylized version of herself, and would edit together a picture of her in the outfit, and what she drew. I always thought that it was really interesting to see how she translated real life into a more cartoonish world, while still keeping enough identifiable traits that the image she drew was recognizable. I never felt inspired to do something similar, although I always looked forward to her posting because to my teenaged self, her level of expertise was the level of success that I wanted to reach as a young artist.

As she got older and began to draw more, although I mean older only in the literal sense of aging as she is still in her mid-twenties, she began to draw her ‘outfit of the days’ less. She switched to drawing other people and began taking inspiration from pictures. She began making posts of her original characters as well, and has even dabbled in fan art as of late. 

It wasn’t until I was looking into her art for a school project that I was hit with a wave of nostalgia looking at her older art. Her art style is still recognizably her’s, although it has changed with time and her growth as an artist. Her poses have gotten better along with her anatomy, and she has such a unique way of shading light and shadows into her work. She has been dabbling in backgrounds recently too, and I think that that is good for me to see because I have always struggled with allowing my characters to appear as though they belong in the background that I drew for them. In all, it was incredible to watch her journey and success as not only an artist, but also as a person. Her art has brought her so many wonderful opportunities at such a young age, and I really think that that is something to aspire to be.