Sometimes I get nostalgic, look back through my old sketchbooks, and cringe. I know it’s unfair to compare little Julie, who was just having fun with pencils and crayons, to today’s Julie, who is semi-serious about improving her art and hopes to make money on it someday— but it’s still pretty fun to see how far I’ve come! A lot of artists do a challenge where they redraw their old art to compare the two, and I tried it recently! Here was my result. The thing I wanted to redraw was this:
I think I made this when I was 15 or 16. It’s one of the first pages in my third sketchbook, and it was colored with the alcohol-based markers I got along with it. I bought both of those things myself with some leftover money from my first summer job, if I remember correctly, so I was pretty excited. Also, please ignore the dumbass note I wrote in the middle of it. I think I felt self-conscious about what I made and coped by joking about it? Who knows. But I mean, I was right— that really is not how hair works. There are all kinds of other wild problems with it, but I’m not going to pull it apart because it’s just something I made for fun when I was a kid.
When I went to redraw this, I thought the original concept was too boring, so I took inspiration from the art from this song and started drawing. I worked on it between late January and early February. This is what I came up with:
Okay, so I know it doesn’t look like much, but even after a few months have passed I’m still proud of it because I tried a lot of things that weren’t in my comfort zone. For example, I usually don’t fill up the whole page with my art, but with this one, I somehow managed to. I also tend to favor a simple coloring style, but here I went all out with details and shading. It’s interesting how, if you look closely, you can see me learn more about how to shade things with colored pencils. So the drawing looks better in some places for that reason.
Also, I’ve been trying to use more backgrounds, even if they’re simple geometric ones, and it really makes my art pop. I know those flowers in the background don’t look like much but they seriously took forever.
Anyway, this redraw challenge was really fun and I’d like to do it more often! I’ve come pretty far since I first started drawing, and it’s also really fun to think about where I’ll be in the future.