[ARCHIVE] art dump #2

    Another art dump this evening! This post features my first ever reference sheet from back in 2018 and two traditional sketches which were cleaned up digitally. All of them are of my fursona, Camper. The sketches were finished during my first unpaid leave from my retail job. Back when COVID-19 first hit. 

    The first image you see is not only my first ever ref sheet, but also the first proper furry art i ever made! I'm actually pretty new to the fandom, having only been in it for a few years. I lurked for a long while before that, but after art school i went all in. You can really see how my art has developed since then. At the time, this was really hard for me to draw, since i knew nothing about proper anatomy, posing, or face angles. I think i did well though, even back then. I plan on updating my ref sheet soon. A lot of Cami's design has changed since then. I mean, she doesn't have the tummy nips at all anymore. She's also based on a teddy bear my mom gave me as a kid and i hope to incorporate more aspects of their design onto her. That bear is very special to me and actually where i got my and by extension, my sona's, name from. It feels fitting to make her resemble her IRL teddy counterpart more. Her characterization is also slightly different, but i suppose most folks wouldn't see that in the art i post? It's a cute little relic of the past for sure. My sona is so much of who i am and having her has really helped me get through my dysphoria and determine how i want to improve my own life. 

    The first of the two sketches after the ref sheet is based on an adorable picture of a bear sniffing a flower held in it's toes. I tried to play with the pose a bit, as my sona is definitely not shaped like a real life bear. I really wanted to find something that worked better for her more plush, anthro, ladybear figure. Also i'm trying to teach myself how to work from, but not copy, references. Work like this has definitely been a step in the right direction. Just generally making existing poses more dynamic and working in specific details from character designs has been a neat challenge and probably the best learning tool i've embraced lately. 

    The second sketch is a scan of a sketchbook page where i drew a lot of Camper as a hamster! I honestly think hamsters look like little rodent bears and i've gotten super into rodents through my buddy Otto, so this all just happened pretty naturally. Nothing super wild to say about those sketches. I had fun playing with hamster features on my sona, especially the big ol' cheek pouches. As you can see, the same page also has a  few pine needles from the tree featured on the album cover for 100 Gecs' album 1000 Gecs taped onto it. Skunkorb and i met up back in March (ironically the day we all realized COVID-19 was gonna be a problem problem) and one of the things we wound up doing was hitting up that tree to take a few pics. It was a fun time! We found a lot of cute lil tributes from fans. If i had to do one thing before the months of isolation, i'm glad it was that. Well that and getting snacks at Mitsuwa. That place is heaven.

    I'm making this post public as i sadly do not have terribly high res versions of these drawings. They max out at about the size FA accepts if i recall. So they're not very high resolution. I'm not really comfortable keeping these behind a paywall. I cleaned the latter two, the sketchbook pages, up a bit at the time but it seems i deleted the files because i didn't really need to keep a .clip document at the ready for the future back when i finished this. or so i thought anyway. you live you learn, i guess! The ref sheet experienced a similar fate as it was created on an old computer that bricked shortly after i made it, and i'm not going to try and get that for you guys as the broken computer is not even in my possession anymore. In the future i'll make sure to back up full res files as well as the finished documents for my art for at least a few years. I just need more permanent external storage for such things. I'm not very responsible with my backups, but i hope having a more consistent art presence to keep up with will encourage myself to do better.