Here's (almost) everything I drew in 2023 -- illustrations, sketches, doodles, little animations, scraps I've never posted before -- all in one place! Fun fact: I drew more this year than any other previous year of my life so far! So this post is gonna be LONG.
With all that out of the way, let's take a scroll down memory lane:
These are the first things I drew this year. I coincidentally posted these right as the year of the rabbit was about to start, but I didn't actually know that was happening. I have no excuse for these drawings. Those little Isaac and Vae doodles in the second panel would become the blueprint for the cartoony style I ended up developing over the rest of the year.

Pretty much immediately after those two drawings I drew this. It was a bit of a tonal shift.
Here's an animated, glitchy version of the above drawing I made later for another post. I have a much higher quality version of this gif but it's like 12 MB so I can't post it here.
I still really like this one. This year I tried to make more of an effort to let my characters'... characterization shine through in my art more. I've been writing about these characters for almost a decade now, but I felt like their personalities never came through as well in my art as they do in my writing. I've been trying to fix that.
For some reason there was like a week where I just drew Caelle thinking about various foods. (The reason is I was hungry)


I also made a blank template for fun and asked people what she was thinking about.
A couple of my friends suggested the pizza drawing above and this little video edit (I'd embed the video here but video embeds and read-mores don't always seem to get along so I'm just dropping a normal link to be safe)
Anyway, @zelkova made this edit:
which I then edited even further:
(legend says she's still standing there to this day)
Also I later made a little wiggly version of the chicken one. For fun.
Here's a collection of sketches I made of Vae using her magic. I still really like how these came out. I don't draw her using her magic very often because I'm intimidated by the task of taking my weird ideas from my writing and translating them into something that actually looks good. I also don't draw action stuff like this very often, so I was practicing a lot of stuff at once with these.


Next I have a sketch for a sort of alternate design for Caelle. Her hair color is changed for undisclosed plot reasons (just think of it as a 'time-skip' design. Or, better yet, don't think about it at all. I've been switching between her two hair colors pretty arbitrarily.) Mostly I wanted to update her outfit. (As if I don't just draw my characters in a different outfit every time I draw them anyway)
(I had a really hard time picking colors for this one. Here's some of the scrapped ones. If she was in 'Super Smash Bros.' these would be her lazy recolor skins)
Here's the first couple of 'big illustrations' of the year. This descriptor is largely arbitrary and meaningless but I don't know how else to describe the way I'm categorizing them in my head. I really love both of these.

This one isn't from 2023, but I did touch it up a little bit in 2023, so it... counts? It's like a remaster! A very gentle remaster that changed almost nothing!
Here's a picture of Caelle singing "I Wanna Be Your Dog 2" by AJJ. All of my art is mostly Just For Me, but this one is even more Just For Me than usual.
I also have this version I never posted that has some of the correction layers and effects turned off. I don't remember why I saved this one.
(Also, this follow-up doodle, presented without comment):
Next up, here's all the character portraits I drew for the "Meet My OCs" post! A handful of these were characters I hadn't drawn in a very long time, and at least one I'd actually never attempted to draw before, so that was fun! I'm also just really proud of that post in general, so I have a soft spot for these drawings even though they're simple and not as polished as I could've made them. I am, however, currently cursing my past self for making precisely eleven of these, meaning there's no good way to arrange them in a grid.
Here's a couple more 'big illustrations'. This one was a self-imposed challenge to make a drawing using only a binary brush, with no color correction layers, blend modes, or any of the usual coloring tricks I normally use. I cheated and used an airbrush on the sky to make the blue gradient, but that's the only time I broke my rules.
I don't have much to say about this other one that I didn't already say in the behind-the-scenes post I made about it. The short version is it gave me a lot of grief and I scrapped a lot of ideas for it and feel like I could've done it better but I'm happy with it overall.
Something I'm noticing as I look through all of these is I drew my feelings a lot this year. Mostly this just resulted in a lot of drawings of my characters thinking about food or being tired.




I don't remember why I drew this but here's a doodle of Caelle making some kind of observation:
Someone commented something to the effect of "You're right but you don't have to point so hard", so I politely asked Caelle to point softer:
Here's the last couple "big illustrations" of the year. This one is another one that I feel like I could have done better but I'd been working on it for too long and it was time to call it done.
THIS one, on the other hand, I'm completely happy with, and it's one of my favorite things I've drawn this year.
Here's a little halloween comic I made in October, which I did instead of my normal halloween illustration. This one confused me for a second as I was digging through my folders cause the .clip file was dated 2022. I forgot that I started on this a year ago and just kind of didn't make it past the initial sketch/brainstorming phase until this year. oops.

And here we have a bunch of Wigglypaint doodles:

Here's a little doodle I made to own some idiot (me) who was whining that I wasn't """productive""" enough.
(Like I mentioned earlier, I drew more this year than I ever have before in my entire life, but I still spent so much time feeling like I wasn't doing enough. It's nice to know that feeling will never go away no matter what, even if I were to work until my bones dissolve and the sun explodes)
Anyway, here's Brick Pizza Tower (I've never played the game but that rat is SO shape)
A handful of messy Caelle sketches:
Several doodles of the true protagonist of pikmin 4:

Some chart I made for a shitpost that I didn't think people were going to like as much as they did:
My little scribble for Cohost Community Canvas (thanks again to everyone who doodled with me!) :
A sketch of Vivian wearing a hat I saw in a dream:
Some kind of horrible shape:
A bunch of random bullshit:
A woman who has never done anything wrong:
The same woman, doing something wrong:
Assorted doodles of Vae and Caelle:

A few from-memory sketches of strangers I keep seeing on the street (world wide web)
Two women who have never done anything wrong:
A comic with way too many words:
Incomprehensible AU nonsense:
An animation of the protagonist of Chulip that I made purely so I could feed him rotating doritos in OBS:
Some kind of horrible shape:
Drawings I made to explain a dream I had about a horrible one piece roguelike excitebike waterslide (telly vision was there):
Some kind of horrible shape:
A concept sketch of a ttrpg character I never got to play:

AND FINALLY, YOUR REWARD FOR MAKING IT ALL THE WAY TO THE END: THE WORST IMAGE IN MY FOLDER. NEVER-BEFORE SEEN. EXTREMELY BAD. I'M PULLING IT OUT OF THE VAULT JUST FOR YOU.
And that's it! I drew a lot this year, and my art changed a lot this year, as well as my approach to art and how I think about it. I let myself relax, take it easy, and slack off a lot more, so I did a lot more sketching and doodling than usual. Since I was drawing more, and getting ideas out faster, I also ended up sort of being able to draw faster in general. The line between my sketches and finished drawings got blurrier and blurrier, my sketches got cleaner, and my illustrations got faster. In a roundabout way, dropping my perfectionist attitude and letting myself slack off made me better at art in the end. And I had more fun drawing that way, too.
In spite of all that stuff I just said about improvement and change, I don't think my art style itself actually changed all that much this year -- it was moreso just my approach. And I sort of just developed additional art styles alongside my normal one. I'm, like, multiclassing art styles now. It's fun. The only significant change to my "standard" art style, I think, is that I've completely stopped using the crisp, clean pen tool that I used to use for my final line art, and now instead I just do line art with the pencil tool that I've always used to sketch. I use that shit for everything now. I even color and shade with it sometimes.
My biggest takeaway from everything that I've learned this year is that I need to chill out, let things be imperfect, focus on having fun, and just draw whatever makes me want to keep drawing.
Anyway uhh thanks for looking at my art and I hope you have a happy new year!








