This troper makes Xawu!, as of oct 26th, working on the 28th strip (buffer!) she's experienced art evolution, on the same strip, drawing the same character over 20 times because it didn't look right. He changed from a super-deformed chibi anime... thing, to a lightly realistic good looking character called Farrell, of course by the time anyone actually sees him on screen he will be an OldShame of mine (Buffer!). Please check it out.

This artistic troper draws so much, mostly on pencil and paper, and she notices how her newer works have improved since the first. Unfortunately, upon seeing my older works, all those anatomy errors and proportion distortion give me the willies.

You too?! God, even looking at stuff from a week ago I'm disgusted.

How many backwards hands have you drawn?

This troper's drawn a few. -grimace-

I've drawn a few as well. Funny thing is, I've noticed one piece of official art with a backwards hand.

I know. Just looking at drawings from three months ago, I wonder how I ever survived looking at my drawings. I will probably think the same thing a year from now.

Exactly! I realized in junior high that even if a drawing I just did looked okay, it would would look awful in a few months. As a result, I rarely let anyone see my drawings. I figure that I will once I can look at something I drew a year ago without cringing.

Same here.

This troper didn't draw any backward hands, but she doesn't even need to wait for a few months until she starts hating her old works. A few weeks will do, because she always tries to sketch everything many times over and looking for tutorials before doing a new work, so her style changes rather quickly. She tries to be optimistic and think that it means that she improved, and not that she used to suck.

Well, THIS troper has been drawing all her life, and looking way back at some of my old stuff makes me physically ill. Mind you, I'm in college now, and 20 years old. I looked at my stuff from junior high. Brain bleach was required.

This troper recently became an Art Major. Even looking at drawings from the beginning of the semester make me ponder burning them.

This troper has gone from cartoony, to anthropormorphic, to almost decent anime style, to detailed, to Puni Plush, to EXTREMELY detailed, and now?

The largest changes in my art have been stick figure->flesh figure->anime phase with pointy chins, elbows, disturbingly huge eyes->shift away from this when I realize I suck at it to a->more cartoonish, western style. In February I was looking at a drawing I did for Christmas '08, the difference was shocking. Obviously it's even more pronounced now. The most embarrasing art shifts are when I realize that I can't reproduce a really good drawing I did awhile ago because of the changes.

Hmm. Now I'm aiming for a realistic style. See?!

This Troper has been drawing since preschool, and as you'd imagine, my style and skill has changed and improved over the years. Probably biggest weaknesses in my art until a few years ago is a generally comprised of A. a lack of detail or substance and B. forgetting to erase lines. Then I started to use pencil shading. My shading and composition got steadily better over the years, until I could control my shading style to not look like scribbling. The fact that I often go to an Art camp during the summer to improve my skills helps. But when I went to look at my older stuff however, cue me throwing a massive chunk of them in the trash.

Amperschwa is willing to bet he's got a worse case than all of you. He's 14; and he's actually kept a comic series running since he was ''nine.'' It's at #899 as of 21 December 2009, and here are the changes, in complete detail. -> #1 - #370 2004-2006: Heads circular. Bodies rectangular. They both share the same diameter. Arms direct center of body, sometimes starting a few mms below the shoulder line. Hands puffball. Pants no more than another rectangle below the shirt, and the shoes L shaped. Eyes straight lines | |, noses look exactly like a less than sign (>). Hair is scribbled on the top. -> #371 - #760 2006-2008: Take the above on a 3D plane and rotate it roughly 20 degrees in the direction of the camera. -> #761 - #790 2008-2009: The eyes. Oh, God, the eyes. They're like 270 degree incomplete circles with the open part to the nose. The pupil was a smaller complete circle. Everything else? The exact. Same. Thing. -> #791 - 2009: Drastic overhaul of everything. The hands are proportionally drawn and are correctly drawn based on position and which hand it is, and what it's doing; the heads take on a much more {{animesque}} look. The circles of the eyes were reduced to two lines that represent the bottom of the eye to the cheek and the top is the eyelid. A third line if present is an eyebrow. The shirts vary between multiple styles, hair isn't scrappy, the characters vary in height and body build, removed the female characters of their flat-chestedness, there is more background detail, objects are drawn in a psuedo 3D perspective, all that. ->Amperschwa: And every so often I do find an old one and it makes me cringe. I hate it. Find an old one for me and I will not hesitate to kill you.

This troper wants a link to Ampershwa's comic

This troper has noticed how his writing has improved since the first story he wrote. Just comparing his earliest work (From 2000) to one of his more recent stories (From early 2009) shows a drastic change in his writing style.

This Troper is a writer as well and feels exactly the same way! Looking back, her newbie stories were written in a {{TotallyRadical}} style (don't blame her, she started around middle school) and the spirit of it is still there, although her work and narration has matured. Now her writing is actually endurable.

Same here. My first novel(ish) hurts my brain just to look at it. My latest novel (60+ pages) impressed my English 101 teacher. I just started writing novels 4 years ago.

This troper has drastically changed her pixel shading style since she started, along with her drawing style.

This troper never could draw the Tracy brothers of {{Thunderbirds}} properly, so I made little doodle caricatures of them. These doodles featured them with no fingers, no noses, no ears, big eyes, and a bit of StylisticSuck. Their first doodleventures were mostly about their attempts to avoid {{Smitten Teenage Girl}}s. Looking back, I notice that my StylisticSuck has actually evolved into a style of its own; the proportions are more consistant, their lines are smoother, and they're actually pretty '''good-looking!''' (It's the ''Tracy brothers'', what can you do?)

This troper is a frikkin second year uni art major. She got a 5 on both AP design and drawing, had a scholastics portfolio, and was extremely confident in her work... She recently dug up her portfolio, full of typical highschool renderings and portraits, and wondered when she became an experimental expressionist dealing with contemporary issues. The old work that she once boasted uncontrollably about is now embarrassing and trite, and she realizes she has a long way to go still...

I got a reality check about that a few days ago. I found a drawing from about a year ago, and I literally had to throw it out of my hand to prevent me from doing a bunch of physical damage to what my mother finds "charming".

This Troper draws mostly on paper, and keeps all of them together. Looking back at the ones from the beginning of the year and older makes me ponder burning the lot of them.

At the beginning of the school year, I had to learn all over how to write presentable cursive because of the school I go to. Now, nearly three months later, I write neat enough to consider it better than most adult handwriting.

When I was a young, pretentious lad (I still am, but not as young anymore) about 12 or 13, the poetry I wrote...Suffice to say, I think it'd make good firewood. These days I'm more into songwriting, and I have most DEFINITELY improved since my early years. Of course, half the songs I write (and pretty much all the songs I record) I end up wincing at, but they probably aren't as bad as I think (I hope).

This troper started drawing in the sixth grade. Looking back...eww *burns drawings*

{{superfroggy}}: Hell, I've even had this happen '''on the same page'''. Of the five characters I'm currently looking at, the first is a horrific faux-anime abomination with plastic-looking hair and nightmarish bug eyes that are not unlike the work of a certain indie video game creator, while by the last two I seemed to have settled into a more natural-looking art style (although it is still noticeably {{Animesque}} -- once a weeaboo, always a weeaboo). [-I still can't draw hands, though.-]banter:I find this page strangely inspirational.

This Troper has been drawing for 11 years now, and at 14 years old, she has begun to cringe at the work she made merely three years ago. this image was the first drawing she had ever made of her then-fan character Sihira. Compare with her most recent drawing of the same character. She's come a VERY long way.

This troper has come a long way with his artwork, my art used to be down right mediocre back in the day I couldn't draw very well at all I couldn't even draw cartoons very well, when I took an art class in high school my style changed considerably to the point where I could draw just about anything, my portrait drawings look realistic to an extent and I try to challenge my skills when I feel like it.

I also keep a little notebook where I draw some of my favorite scenes from cartoon series and my art style has improved from when I first started drawing scenes in it 5 years ago.

This Troper has gone through a lot of changes with his art style. While mostly staying within the same style. Little things, like proportions, height and eyes change fairly often. He also had numerous (humanoid) characters, two of which were based upon a swordfish and a crustacean (Named Peter and Paul, respectively). They're constantly evolving and their first versions look nothing like what they do now. Peter had skinny limbs a large head and small eyes and Paul looked like an Xenomorph drag queen and was green and had sharp claws. Nowadays, Paul is more crab/lobster looking with rounded off claws and with red coloring while Peter has a long sleeved shirt (complete with detailing on the neck and sleeve collars) and a more proportioned body. Yeah, I came a long way.

My drawings have changed a lot since I was younger, been drawing all of my life, and theyre pretty much the same style but with a lot of changes.

At first my people had round or square bodies and very thin arms and legs with large hands, and dots for noses

Then the people looked more normal, but with small heads and quite long necks. Everyone had the same body shape though and adults looked like taller versions of kids.

Then my characters had no necks at all, and big heads. Their eyes were always closed cause i couldnt draw open eyes without them looking creepy. The hairstyles were very basic, with the hair colour and hair decorations the only way to tell characters apart. I couldnt draw short hair very well, all of my short haired characters had hair that was just a line above their eyes and everything above that was coloured in their hair colour.

Then my adult female characters had a more realistic body shape, I learnt to draw eyes properly, and my characters all have AnimeHair cause it looks cool. It still looks child like though, despite the comic I draw being full of violence and zombies.

The reason this troper posts so little of her work on deviantART is that by the time she gets up off her ass and lugs her laptop downstairs to her scanner, her artwork style has already drastically improved, and she ends up turning away too many old sketches.

This troper has been drawing since kindergarten, so of course there's quite a bit of it there. Originally I drew in typical "little kid" style, with rounded heads and bad proportions; they were essentially glorified stick figures. That lasted until about 1999 when I made a concentrated effort to change my style, and started into some weird combination of Pokémon and Digimon's style. These days I still draw anime style, but it could almost be called halfway stuck between anime and realistic? Besides that there's been a large improvement in the pictures themselves, in that since bout 2007 or so there have been a great many more attempts at dynamic poses and perspective than I would have done before that.

This troper has been drawing since preschool so i've had a few styles. Originally males were a circle with a face on top of some rectangles while the females were a circle on top of a triangle with stick limbs. Then for 1st-3rd grade I drew people with freakishly long necks, backward hands, hair made of spikes and boxy bodies. 4th-6th grade was the worst because I suddenly thought I could draw anime style so I spent those 3 years drawing horriblely disfiged chibi things with huge eyes and almost no mouth. That leads to now (7th grade). Now I draw sonic style anthros in a slice of life comics. Looking back I want to burn alot of my drawings (expesially my horrible chibi drawings).

This troper has been drawing for five years at TLKFAA and has noticed a drastic change in her art. At first all the lions had boxy bodies and looked like horses, now though, they have much more realistically proportioned bodies and the muzzles are shorter. Yeah, my old sketches will never again see the light of day.

This troper draws a rather sporadically updated webcomic. First comic (2006.06.29.) - most recent comic (2010.04.15.).

This troper dug up an old drawing of his from 2007. He remembers thinking that it was the greatest thing he had ever made. He then decided to redraw it in his current style: He had improved.

This troper used to draw cartoon people with anime hair and no ears, eyebrows, or fingers. It's taken me about ten years (which is more than half of my life so far) to develop an anime style that I'm happy with and that stays consistent from drawing to drawing.

I draw all the time pretty much since I was 8. There's a significant difference between my early freshman year of high school drawings to my drawings today. Before I had the beady eyes, everybody was flat chested, and had effed up hands. Today I have more of an animesque style with slightly better hands and they actually have some mass on them. Plus shading. Lots and lots of shading.

This more-Lurker-than-Troper, started a comic-drawing course last october (with professionals from a famous comics company as teachers). Before, she was pretty happy with her drawings. Now (end of February), she can't look at her old ones without feeling a wee sick in the stomach. What took me years to learn alone, was squashed in just a few months, and greatly, -greatly- improved, thanks to having someone there to point out the errors and give advice. I'm happy with my current style, but I know I can do way, -way- better. Just need practice.

Me. Is there anything more that needs to be said? Okay, maybe there is. Like just about everyone else here, I too have to frown upon my earlier drawings (gathered up into a huge stack of chronologically-arranged portfolios), sometimes even if they are relatively new. But at times I find that way earlier stuff, even those drawn several years ago, look a lot better than what I have drawn since then. As if I had gone through an artistic low between that time and now. And although I have been drawing since my early years, I never took it on myself to actually study the way shapes, lights and perspective work, until quite recently (which is a couple of years ago, when I completely overhauled my style). I still suck at most of these, and am quite disappointed to realize that my skills have basically stagnated for the last few years, or last few portfolios... ''But!'' My lines are so much cleaner than before! Ahem. My characters, on the other hand, clearly have evolved. Faces have become more defined and less generic, human hands now have five fingers, and my dinosaur characters have become feathered, but only gradually -- you perhaps wouldn't even notice the change while flipping through my pictures in order.

There was a time, though, when I had to purposefully de-evolve my style: elementary school. Every kid around me drew normally, and not wanting to stand out, I decided to "sink to their level". This lasted for years, although in my free time, I got to be myself again.

I first got into drawing (well, online anyway) as a real hobby in 2006. In three years I got better at drawing than I had in the twelve years of my life before I started. If I look at my old deviantART, I can really see the difference from that terrible-concerning-just-about-everything dog picture I drew, until the latest picture of one of my characters, where the anatomy is not perfect, but much better. Sadly, I stopped drawing quite so much after 2009, but I still do it on occasion, and now I'm better than I was back in 2009! I'm also trying to get better at drawing people. Of course, they don't look that great yet, but already I can see the improvement. :) Click here to return to the main article, and do notice the differences since the first version.