NightAuctor/a-flyleaf’s 10 Years of (deviant)Art

At the tender age of [barely old enough to pass COPPA guidelines], I joined deviantArt for reasons that have since been lost to time. (I was pretty reckless with site-joining so it was probably just on a whim.) My earliest digital art is floating around the Photobucket void somewhere, though I don’t think I was drawing much at this point. I didn’t have a tablet, and used a laptop trackpad with either MSPaint or GIMP (with the path tool for lineart).

Definitely did not draw humans at this point, at least not digitally. This year also marked the first reference art for Slade Auctor and Nightpath, my former dA namesakes (NightAuctor).

upload count: 12

Big fucking year. Got a tablet at some point in January (an off-brand hand-me-down that I still use!), so between that and being more active on dA via involvement in the Nuzlocke community, I posted a ton of stuff. (Set a record for upload count that I only just beat in 2021, actually ;V)

Also features my earliest (digital) forays into comic and human art. Most of the latter makes me die inside nowadays, but I’m a stickler for archival and the improvement’s nice to see. This year also marked the debut of Zero, an adoptable who’s since become something of a mascot.

upload count: 74

I am not entiiiirely sure why I didn’t post much this year. I joined tumblr at some point, which has something to do with the low count over the next few, but I don’t remember posting that much art over there in the early days? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, basically. I thiiiink my corner of the Nuzlocke community was slowing down too, which could have something to do with it.

Still primarily used GIMP, with a few stray vectors since I used Inkscape for a class. And that’s about it!

upload count: 24

The true beginning of my descent into the tumblr void. Most of my art from this and the next few years was posted primarily there, with dA reposts for stuff I really liked, and so the upload count is kind of piddling. My first blog has also since been nuked (wasn’t voluntary, did something stupid, long story), so if art from this era ever sees the light of the internet again it’ll have to be dug up from my file backups. Big sad.

Started using FireAlpaca at some point, because GIMP updated and broke my pen pressure or something. (FA is still my primary digital art program! Nowadays I only use GIMP to dig through old stuff.)

upload count: 7

Got obsessed with a blue rock. As noted in the yearly summary, I was finally starting to be happy with my art, including humans (humanoid rock-people??), so more drawing happened and more of those drawings actually got posted. Various prompts floating around tumblr helped with that, too. (It’s still the #1 thing I miss from that hellsite, but alas not nearly enough to warrant a return.)

While it’s just barely represented in this year’s uploads, 2015 also marks my joining dragon neopets, sparking an on-and-off affair that persists to this day.

upload count: 16, not including a 2021-posted tumblr dump

Gradually stopped being obsessed with the rock. Also launched my first comic project, The Firebird Effect, which lasted for about a year until petering off due to compounding behind-the-scenes problems and subsequent loss of interest. Was still a great learning experience though, I regret nothing.

Oh yeah, and I started college between last year and this, which included a couple figure drawing classes. My human proportions were still pretty wonky in retrospect, but I think (hope?) my increasing confidence with human anatomy was showing, by sheer output volume if nothing else.

upload count: 38, not including comic cover or pages

Apparently most of my art this year was for school, most of which remains private because 1) at the time I was paranoid about stolen work, and 2) nowadays I care less about that (such is the internet) but I haven’t gotten around to dumping it all. Ah well. Did lots of doodling and continued TFE and whatnot.

upload count: 17, not including comic cover or pages

Revisited a couple old characters and (re)developed their story, which still hasn’t turned into A Project™ but it was still a good exercise in character development. I still have on-and-off thoughts of doing something with some combination of them, but it’s not a top priority.

Also got obsessed with virtual anime people, which would gradually (starting at the end of this year) turn into 404. Before then I had a stint on reddit because I was embarrassed to show the full extent of my weeb obsession under my usual monikers (alas, I am not immune to internalized #cringe), so that was an interesting experience. I can no longer say I can’t draw Anime™, smh.

Oh, and tumblr tried to ban porn at the end of this year, which led to the deployment of content-flagging AIs that couldn’t discern sand from skin. Tons of perfectly innocuous images got flagged, people left the site in droves (whether they cared about nsfw or not), and I hopped on the bandwagon because I’d been getting disillusioned with social media for a while. People still use tumblr, in the year of our hell 2021, but much as it was a pivotal influence on me while it lasted, sayonara hellsite it’s good to be gone~

upload count: 13, including a webpage preview that wasn’t published until 2021

Two main reasons for the lack of uploads this and next year: first, most of my art was in small-ish doodle dumps, which I don’t tend to upload on their own; and second, lots of it was 404 concept art, which I didn’t want to pubilcize period. (Changed my mind on that recently, though.)

Besides that, while this is also not really a thing you see in the year’s uploads, I decided to heck with clean lineart; general thoughts on the visual purpose of art style have been floating around since 2018, and persist to this day.

upload count: 15, including a recently-publicized 404 summary

Big personal year, character arc ongoing. 404 concepts kept happening, dabbled in RP again. Also gave the cringetober challenge a whirl for no reason except Why Not, which produced a couple fun designs that were used to pad out the ArtFight character roster in the following year.

upload count: 33, including a recently-publicized 404 summary

Suddenly activity. There’s a couple reasons for this: first, that I started uploading monthly sketchdumps (which have gradually gotten longer as I am less and less judicious about what gets put in them); second and possibly moreover, I got hooked on a new story idea, which was not actually intended to be A Project until recently so I decided to upload almost everything with reckless abandon. (Prior to this I followed the usual concept-art-publication idea that the story needed to be told through One Pure Canon first and then the bonuses could be shared, because dubiously-canonical scribbles are not storytelling, but… well, see the blog post linked above. I’m thinkin about it.)

Also, did an ArtFight for the first time! That was fun. I have too many characters bookmarked and want to go just as ham next year.

Anyway, I don’t know where the current idea will take me, but I do know I’m generally pretty satisfied with my digital art nowadays. In some ways I wonder if I’m stagnating a bit, having done lots more experimentation with style & made more obvious improvements in previous years, but such is the cyclical climb of improvement. Besides, I definitely still notice things I could change or fix after every other upload; it’s just that nowadays, that comes down more to the little details than “oh my god this whole face is wrong.”

Speaking of faces I’m running out of shapes and my sameface allergy can’t take it help

upload count: 80, not including a preview of this page