The other night I was looking through my old sketch books and it was crazy to see how far I’ve come with my art. Especially when I could remember doing the old work and how I felt about it at the time or what inspired me. I took a few photos on my trusty mobile phone (so not the best photos I’m afraid) and wanted to share them with you here.
This first few are from 1994 when I was either 9 or 10 years old. I’ve been drawing faeries forever and here my biggest influence was Cicely Mary Barker. My sister had the Flower Fairies Alphabet book and I spent lots of time trying to copy the pictures.
A quick sketch of a wizard because wizards are cool, obviously.
Towards the end of ’94 maybe even 1995 is this sketch of looking through a witches’ window. This drawing was inspired by the movie Hocus Pocus, I loved that film and all it’s witchy magical goodness!
This mermaid picture isn’t dated but looking at the style and knowing I was a huge fan of Shirley Barber at the time I’d guess it was around 1995.
Another from 1995 my Princess and the Unicorn picture scored me an equal 2nd place in our local Show Art Competition! I think it was the first drawing competition I’d ever won – even if I did share 2nd place it was pretty exciting. I think I won $3 or something haha!
Onto 1996 (Grade 6 / age 11 or 12) I remember loving this drawing I did of a little faery and thinking I had her in perfect proportion. It took me a few years and even now it can be tricky. I had not yet got the hang of shading.
My Grade 6 project.. we must’ve had free choice on the subject because I chose to write about my favourite artist, you guessed it, Shirley Barber.
My entry in the local Show again, this time I came 1st place! 1996 age 12, strong influence from Shirley Barber again and her beautiful mermaid art.
These are some of my first digital artworks. I first started drawing digitally waaay back when we got our first computer in 1993 but I don’t have any of those. These range between 1995 – 1999 and I created them using Microsoft Paint. Now here’s the kicker.. I would zoom in as far as possible, so I could see all the pixels, then draw these by colouring each pixel in the grid. Explains why they’re so small! Except for the circles and rectangles of course, I used the shape tools for those.
Early 1997 I painted this picture of my favourite film at the time.. can you guess what it was!? And so the goth inspired art began. There’s a lot of darker pictures in my high school years.. but still plenty of colourful faeries too!
These are great! It’s always fun to go back and see what inspired you in at a certain time.