2024 Art Recap
22 Aug 20252024 has been quite an unpredictable year for me, art-wise.
Things started out real messy with my ill-fated Daily Doodles project, but around the midpoint of the year, I “updated” my artstyle pretty much out of nowhere and that very quickly snowballed into some extremely productive months at first, then it snowballed even harder into an insane series of drawings that, 12 months earlier, I wouldn’t have even dreamt of making.
I thought it’d be nice to celebrate last year’s art progress (and to breathe some life into my blog) by going over it in this post.
A little bit of context
Before we get started with this recap of a whole year’s worth of art, I wanted to give some context on how things were around late 2023.
I had recently entered my Yume 2kki arc, bringing along a sketchier artstyle and some initial experimentation with digital painting.
Inspired by SaKo’s daily doodles, I was thinking about trying to take on a similar challenge myself. Partly just because it sounded like a cool thing to do, but also because I thought it would’ve been a good way to improve my drawing speed and quality over time.
I also thought it would’ve been a nice change to make art that didn’t need me to commit to it for extended periods of time. Though frankly, my drawings generally don’t take that long to finish - we’re talking far less than a month, excluding a handful of extreme edge-cases.
Another advantage I expected from not needing to commit to “long” drawings was more freedom to experiment: I could just try whatever I wanted for any given daily doodle, and if it didn’t work out, I wouldn’t have wasted more than a day on it.
Last but not least, I thought drawing daily would’ve kickstarted a positive feedback loop which I expected to work sorta like this:
- Make a drawing for the day and post it;
- Next day comes around;
- I can feel good about having drawn something the previous day (+ I can feel good about Fedi interactions on the previous day’s post);
- I’m feeling positive enough to draw again;
- Back to step 1.
With this context out of the way, just one last thing before we begin: you’ll find plenty of links to art posts throughout this page. If you’re feeling curious about any of the drawings shown here, you can check out those smaller posts to read up on whatever nonsense I wrote about those drawings in particular.
All that said, I feel like we’re ready to embark on this little journey, starting with…
The dailies arc
A thrilling January…
First things first, let’s turn the clock back to January. Well, last January.
If you couldn’t tell from the ridiculous abundance of Urotsuki art, I was still very much in my Yume 2kki arc, but I was also quite excited about the then-new dailies project, which I used as an excuse to try and experiment way more than usual with new characters to draw and whatnot.
Said excitement is definitely best seen in the first couple weeks, where I threw in survivors from Risk of Rain Returns and Starstorm 2, redrew a sketch of Nira-chan from Byoushin wo Kamu’s MV I made back in late 2022 (probably?), turning its rough idea into a proper high-effort drawing (so much for “doodles”, huh?). I even squeezed in some experimentation with digital painting in DD008!
The dailies also introduced the artstyle I’d be using for the first few months of 2024, for better or for worse. It was pretty much a further simplification of what I was already doing in late 2023 with a sketch of Reol in the Gokusaishiki MV. Oh yeah, speaking of 2023, anyone remember Snacked for a Hundred Yume? I should totally bring that back someday, although I’m not sure how my current, more detailed style would play with 2kki fanart.
Moving further along January… things already stop looking that bright. I quickly started falling into the pit of sleep-deprived and rushed doodles, but I still managed to pepper in some good stuff along the last week of the month, such as DD028 and 030.
…a messy February…
Now onto February - kind of a polarizing first week, mostly comprised of bad, uninspired and/or rushed doodles, but also bringing DD033 and DD038, which I still believe are very good digital paintings.
This month also marks the point in dailies where I’d begin constantly falling behind schedule and having to “catch up” over and over again, but for a while at first that didn’t stop me from making good art.
DD047, 048 and 043 were all catch-up entries, but regardless they’re easily some of the best of the month. For the first two, I also toyed around with the one-off idea of “connected” entries - fun fact, I actually made them on the same canvas!
Towards the end of this second month I tried painting a couple more 2kki worlds, rather poorly, and also Minecraft’s infamous pack.png which I believe came out quite nicely, especially the colors!
The end of this second month was also entirely catch-up dailies. The situation got bad enough I figured I’d try drawing five of them back to back, which I managed to pull off almost entirely overnight.
Surprisingly, those weren’t even all bad drawings! DD055 and 056 especially were some really nice ones.
Overall, we could say February ended up redeeming itself! But alas, now is the time to move onto to the breaking point of the whole dailies project…
…and a tumbling March (and April)
March was an absolute trainwreck. At first, things weren’t that bad, starting off just a couple days behind.
…but then I got caught up in playing through the Metroid Prime Trilogy after a whole childhood of wishing to get my hands on it, and well, I clearly struggled to get the glue off between myself and the game: those 2 days behind schedule quickly turned into 10 days, then 12, you get the idea.
Eventually, April came around, but my dailies were still stuck at the middle of March.
At this point I had probably realized the dailies weren’t only not going anywhere anymore (especially considering most of the March entries I did draw were pretty much filler), but they were also taking too big of a toll on my sleep schedule (mostly true for January and February) to justify keeping them going.
So, I silently and unceremoniously abandoned the project. From here, I spent the rest of April mostly working on my current Linux setup (which is still not finished as of writing this!), and my drawing output reduced down to class sketches at school… damn, feels weird to mention school a year after being done with it for good.
At any rate, “March” did have its own handful of good dailies.
May
Fast-forward one month, and I’m finally ready to tackle art again, after slightly over three months of losing sleep to catch up with rushed dailies. At this point, I had grown tired of the oversimplified artstyle I used at the beginning of the year, and I felt like experimenting a bit with a messier, sketchier style that could pack more detail, while also being inspired by a half-body poses cheatsheet posted by Developing on Fedi.
Meanwhile, over the last month I had come across a lot of art of this cool character with red hair styled like twin drills, and after a little research I ended up learning she’s an UTAU voicebank… or SynthV? From the sound of it, seemed pretty much like Vocaloid under a couple different names. But oh well, I didn’t really care about that, I just wanted a refsheet of the SynthV outfit of this character so I could draw her.
Making some fanart of her was a good excuse to try out my new, experimental style on digital art, and it went fine enough.
Oh, I also temporarily dropped Krita for MS Paint again - I felt like all the tools and brushes and whatnot were just distracting me when I needed to focus more on fundamentals.
By the way, the name of that character I drew was Kasane Teto, surely I was just gonna draw her a couple times and forget about her…
The Teto arc
June
…or maybe not.
After coming across Fumble!, a song voiced by Teto, it seems my fate was sealed for good - I was gonna be obsessed with her for the rest of the year.
The song was actually so good it singlehandedly got me making fanart of it within the very first day of listening to it… about 40 times on loop. At minimum.
This was easily already among the best drawings of the year thus far, but I was obviously not gonna stop that soon. I had to draw her another dozen times at the very least.
July
July was definitely one of the best months of the whole year art-wise, absolutely teeming with variety - in terms of characters, poses, and whatnot - and productivity, seeing as how I managed to keep a drawing streak of like, 10 days or something like that? And not in a “make a drawing everyday” sense, just a much more manageable “work on a drawing everyday” sense.
I moved back to Krita as well, armed with a new aliased brush, since I always felt much more comfortable drawing with MS Paint’s pencil rather than any of the antialiased brushes I used for digital art in the past. Are things starting to look familiar yet?
To give you a general picture of this month’s insane variety, I’ve drawn mainstays like Urotsuki and Yama, but also Teto in the Yamcha pose (inspired by Anubi’s Splatsune Miku), Aikoyori’s OC smoking a fat blunt, a character from an otoMAD collab inside of a toilet and a birthday cake falling on the face of Licorice’s OC.
Oh, and Teto doing crack.
August
After such a productive month, it was only natural I was gonna need a bit of a break.
I spent this month catching up on some old gaming culture by playing through the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games, plus the first two Black Ops installments. And since that wasn’t quite enough just yet, I played some Borderlands 3 and Far Cry 4 & 5 on top of that.
But just in time before the end of August, I had it in me to make a horrible Teto doodle that I thankfully managed to salvage the next day (the fixed version is what you’re seeing here).
My friend also somehow got me into Jujutsu Kaisen through a single 16 second video, but I’m sure that’s not going anywhere.
September
Pretty empty, unassuming month, aside from a couple Teto shitposts.
Oh right, almost forgot. And a new best-drawing-of-the-year-so-far towards the end of this month, fueled by what I can only assume is an entirely ordinary amount of passion for Jujutsu Kaisen, which I think I finished watching over the course of September.
The brainrot arc
October
Hold on, I think that wasn’t just passion… nope, with seven drawings about it in a little over a single month it sounds more like obsession.
Jokes aside, the only reason I don’t remember this month as fondly as July is simply because I missed the total lack of rhyme or reason between one drawing and the next in that month. At that time, I just drew whatever goofy thing I had in mind without much thought, planning or high standards.
Well, whatever high standards I might’ve had back then must’ve definitely been much lower than the ones I set for myself during October. Seriously, the quality of my art in this one month absolutely exploded out of seemingly nowhere, probably thanks to more frequent usage of reference, moving to larger canvases and experimenting much more heavily with extra eyecandy like bloom.
November
Another uneventful month… is what you’d be led to believe by the small amount of art I’ve posted. It’s just that I’ve worked on a bunch of stuff behind the scenes which I’m not showing until the project they’re intended for is finished.
But even putting behind-the-scenes stuff aside, this month has had its own flashy showpiece featuring some light animation.
I don’t think November was as exciting as the previous month when it comes to art, but then again this was also when I started a full-time internship and lost most of my free time, so I don’t really blame myself for it. Not to mention, I’ve made enough great art in the months leading up to this one. I don’t think I would’ve minded even if I hadn’t drawn anything insane this month.
December
…and flashy drawings I indeed haven’t made in this final month! Pretty much all sketches and small doodles, but again, I really don’t mind. I had already improved way more than I would’ve ever expected throughout the rest of the year, and I was more than happy with just that.
Back to the present
And just like that, 2024 is already quite far in the past - I have to admit, putting aside my progress in art I don’t think it was that noteworthy of a year… which is quite odd? I did graduate high school, begin an internship now-turned-apprenticeship (which is a big step up), get my first car, but for some reason all that just kinda… blends together.
But that makes me all the happier for having drawing as one of my biggest pastimes! Looking back at several of my old drawings manages to fill my head with memories and context of when I had drawn them, of how much I used to like a franchise, a show, a character…
But most of all, what I’ve made can give more value to a year I’d otherwise consider pretty forgettable, for whatever reason - like 2024! And even if they do fail to bring me back in time, I can still find enjoyment in them by comparing them with what came before, to visualize how my skills have improved as time has gone on.
This post has come… quite a lot later than I initially intended. Art-wise, 2025 hasn’t been particularly incredible so far. But regardless, I have recently dusted off my drawing tablet again and seem to finally be back on track!
I don’t wanna come up with another bright, hopeful ending for this post, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just recycle the one I wrote back in January, with most of the rest of this post…
So now, here’s to hoping this will be another year of character obsessions, franchise brainrot and most of all, of fun in continuing to pursue this hobby of mine.
…like that.
I’m not sure a 2025 art recap will come by when this year also comes to a conclusion, considering half of 2025 so far has been… pretty much nothing, as far as art goes. But who knows, maybe starting from today I’ll go on a new drawing rampage that’ll compensate for these empty, past 6 months? One can only hope!
Now if you don’t mind, it’s now time for me to neglect this blog until 2026 comes around. If you’ve read this far, thank you so much for sticking to the end of this behemoth of a post!
And if you just skipped everything and scrolled straight to the bottom of the page… well, thank you regardless! Gotta treasure the handful of people visiting this site every once in a blue moon, huh?