When I feel as though I have no inspiration to create original art, I tend to draw fan art or re-draw old art of mine. One thing that I can say I’m thankful for is that I’ve kept a decent amount of my old art, from both elementary and middle school/high school. There were times when I hated what I drew and wanted to get rid of it, and sometimes I did but for the most part, I have a decent collection of old art. Now, I find it to be especially helpful. When I don’t have the capacity to draw new stuff, I can reference old art and re-draw it, but also update certain elements to it; while my old art wasn’t terrible, some of the clothing/poses/general aspects of it don’t make sense looking back now. I use a more muted color palette presently, and I used very saturated colors when I was first starting out in digital art. So there are a few things I change in order to really enjoy the process, but I’m also applying my new-found knowledge of art elements and the like. It is also really neat to see how I’ve improved, because there are certain stylistic things that I’ve kept over time, and other things that I’ve changed- I used to think I didn’t have a style and that I never really had one that ‘evolved’ over time, but through looking back, re-drawing, and comparing old art to new art, I can see that I always had a tendency to draw in a certain way.

I used to draw wallpaper for my mom’s phone for every holiday, although I haven’t done that in some time. This year, I noticed that my mom was using an Easter wallpaper that I drew for her back in 2017, and I thought it would be cool to do a quick re-draw of it. I did it during spring break, so I had the time and energy to make some art for myself. I really struggled with making the original image back in 2017. My understanding of anatomy was not all that strong, and my sense of design and color was lacking for my digital art- in my defense, I had only been drawing digitally for three months by then. 

I remember wanting to get a really cool cloud effect on the earth, but didn’t really know how to do so with the brushes in my program, FireAlpaca. I’m guessing Easter must have been close to Earth Day, given that I seemed to combine the two. I also noticed that I used really bright pinks and purples and while her outfit wasn’t the worst, it could definitely be improved. I noticed that with a lot of the wallpapers I drew, I kept the backgrounds white for some reason, and thinking about what I’d change, I knew I wanted to experiment with different background colors.

With the re-draw, I started out by sketching the pose in Procreate. I knew that I still wanted a sitting pose, but I chose to change the way in which she was sitting. From there, I did a few more rough sketches to get a solid base to trace over with my inking brush. I changed her outfit because jeans didn’t feel like the best choice for the vibe I was going for, especially because it was more Easter themed; so, I went for a flowy skirt instead, but ultimately kept the shirt pretty faithful to the original design. I didn’t keep the flower crown, because I thought it would make her hair look a bit odd, although looking back I’m sure I could have made it work (although I did add flowers towards the end of the braid). 

I didn’t color-drop anything, so as well as changing the colors a little bit, I can tell that the hair is a little darker than it originally was (although that was not intentional). I also went for a more simplified background, just because I thought it would work best for the overall look- it would draw less attention away from the girl which is intended to be the focal point. I also added a color overlay, because while the colors looked pretty good all together, I found that using a color overlay brings all of the colors together just that bit more. It was pretty fun to do this redraw and I really like seeing where I’ve improved and how my thought process has changed in six years.