Art Post: My History in Art

So I've been a very art-oriented person since I can remember. It may seem quite pompous of me to say, but my earliest memories are of people complementing on how well I drew or how perfectly shaped my circles were and how good I was at coloring in the lines. Haha. Either I was really talented or they were just really patronizing of an overconfident child.

There was a time when I was legitimately considering pursuing art. Back when I was in fourth grade, I had accounts on sheezyart and deviantart and a good number of people following me and my art. I was quite a child back then, and if you've followed me long enough on this blog, you'd know I wasn't always the happiest of children. This was my art from somewhere between fourth and sixth grade:

I was a rather sad child haha

Yehp. Dark theme, anime looking style, horrible proportions and bad shading. It's the telltale signs of a pre-teen acting out ahaha. But it wasn't always that depressing.

Ahaha, I always laugh at how large I used to draw females' breasts. I think it's a phase I went through. And I'm not exaggerrating when I say I used to draw them large.

It's sad to think that my first ever colored work, circa sixth grade was of a busty Japanese Anime woman with a badly drawn dress. I think I was overcompensating for the lack of cleavage I knew I would eventually have to deal with ahaha. Seven to eight years later and I'm still as flatchested as ever :P

I had such a complex that someone dared me to draw something without boobs, and this was the result:

I tried.

But the point is that for most of my life, I always thought I'd have a chance as an artist, even a writer, or maybe a scientist. Heck, one point in my life, when I was a competitive figure skater, I thought I'd make it to the olympics, but that's another story to be told at a different time. The point was, I really didn't have any focus when I was young. I was one of those people who was good at a little bit of everything, and not exceptional at anything, and I think that's how I am even until now.

It's stuff like that that makes it hard to decide what career path to choose, and eventually I ended up choosing to center myself around Science. Thus, I attended a science high school, Philippine Science High School - Main Campus to be specific. It's actually quite prestigious although I did hold some past resentment of it during my days there (sift though my 2008-2010 posts, you'll see what I mean)

I did all this at the expense of my pursuit of art, but somehow I managed to keep it alive, although I haven't really improved much since then.

This was the earliest I could find of my art in high school. Excuse the tackiness of it all. I was young and I was essentially a n00b at Photoshop. This was my class and there are far too many inside jokes for you to even fathom what it all means, but for your reference, that's me, third from the left at the first row from the bottom. Yes, I used to have short hair then. I know, it seems like a downgrade from my art in grade school, which is saying something because that was when I had transferred from my original school to PSHS. You can tell that my priorities were different and art was more of a hobby now that I was science-concentrated.

When I was in my second year of high school, I started to question why I was even concentrating so much on science. I drew a lot more then and spawned a few decent works:

Self-portrait 2nd Year HS

Finally, my art was getting back on track (and my coloring on photoshop wasn't as tacky) - but this time in expense of my grades. Second Year was by far my lowest year grades-wise. It was almost as if my art and my good grades could not co-exist. That sucked for me, because I legitimately enjoyed drawing haha.

But somehow, between second year and the years that followed, I was able to find a nice balance of the two, and I got better at both over time. You've seen a lot of my art posts from this period of my life here already, but here are a few I dug up from my closet.

And I got better with digital work as well.

Self-Portrait (somewhere between 2nd year and 4th year)

This is unfinished, but  thought it was pretty, so meh.

And now here I am with my current style of drawing (it hasn't changed since 2009), which is a hybrid of realism and some sort of anime, I'm not actually entirely sure. I'm not even sure if I've improved or gotten horrible over the years.

This is the colored version of my art post here.

So I guess all I'm trying to say is that although I'm not an artist, I still really value art. I may not be as good as all those professionals out there, but I'm not letting that stop me. And for all you other art-oriented people out there, you shouldn't let it stop you either. I'll continue to make art and who knows, maybe in addition to my passion for Molecular Biology, I can sideline as an artist/writer as well? Hahaha.

Self Portrait, 2012

Don't forget to Live, Love, and Laugh! :)

-Ada xoxo