Another year, another art review! 2025 has laid its greasy palms to rest and I REALLY need a shower. It had good art though! Pretty happy with my art style progression this year. I know I say this EVERY year and this one is likely no different but I think I’ve finally found an art style I want to continue with permanently. Now let’s see what Summ one year from now has to say about that. You know the drill, month by month, commentary for each one.
Pretty uninteresting month to start with. Unfortunate! A Skweeb piece and gift art for a friend that I can’t show. I was likely busy around this time. I was also starting to feel a little discontent with my current art style at this time too, so there’s that. Not much to mention, things get more interesting later.
Okay! An interesting month! I can work with this. Firstly, art style exploration. A lot of it. Some of it I’m happy with, some of it I’m not happy with. I’m by far most happy with the Birdhouse In Your Soul art I made this month. It's a very experimental piece, but I’m quite fond of it. I don’t typically do experimental art, even now, but I felt like I wanted to do something and the end result was beautiful. Lastly, I contributed to the Crazy Clown Collab on Newgrounds this month! I am really happy with the Lucy drawing I made for it and I hope I’m able to contribute to more collabs in the future.
Some nice new art of Chao, and I made a social media banner as well, finally… A NEW RHYTHM HEAVEN GOT ANNOUNCED? Well colour me surprised, I just had to make a drawing for it! These fellers were shown in the trailer and they spoke to me… in a figurative sense, I didn’t hear their voices or anything. The ONE Nintendo Direct I couldn’t see live and they pulled this on me. The audacity. In all seriousness, I’m quite excited for Groove and hope it lives up to the quality of previous Rhythm Heaven games considering how long it’s been!
Starting off April: Yet more art style exploration! A funny little Jevil, a Kirby that, while I didn’t initially care for, I’ve grown to love over the course of the year and finally, oh hey, another collab! Past Summ did not disappoint. This pesky Waddle Doo was for the Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Collab! It was great fun to participate in and I thank the mods for hosting it. One thing I noticed while drawing this was that the colours were quite pleasing. The shading looks really nice and I’d like to do more of it. Surely that doesn’t mean anything!
I took a little bit of a break from drawing… for like two weeks. I could have sworn it was longer. But when I came back, I tried doing something a little different: Some high contrast shading. It didn’t look too good at first, but hey, I got better. Next up was a Meta Knight using some PHOTO reference! Not that I hadn’t done that before, but it’s still really cool to use a picture I took myself as pose reference. I think this drawing came out pretty damn good too.
What’s this? Art Fight’s comin’ up!... In like two months, but still. I need to get some reference ready! And hoo boy did I. I’ll only be showing a single piece of reference for this month, but the high contrast shading? The layout of the reference? The fun little character logos I made? Pure catharsis.
More reference art! But first, Deltarune Chapter 3 & 4 just dropped. I gotta draw a Jevil for the occasion! Not too happy with this one honestly, things just didn’t come together as I wanted them to. But that’s no reason to be upset, because I got right to work on the rest of my character references, including some for characters I hadn’t yet properly established! Spooks received a complete redesign that turned him from a fairly generic pumpkin guy into a pumpkin vampire! I really enjoyed designing the clothes for him. I took inspiration from characters like Alucard, from Casltevania. Also, both Mint and Gravi have been established as proper Summ characters and now have reference art! Cool!
Art Fight mooonth! Last year, I wanted to do a drawing every day, but I couldn’t quite achieve it. This year, I passed with flying colours! One drawing every day for 30 days… Art Fight is 31 days but 30 is a nice round number so I didn’t do one on the final day. Does it mean I didn’t do one EVERY day? Yes. Do I care? No.
If you'd like to browse all the art I did for Art Fight this year, you can do so here.
Unlike last year, no personal pieces this month. Sorry! Doing one piece of Art Fight art every day tends to not leave a lot of time for other things. Who’da guessed?
Well that is, except for one thing…
Ah yes, August, the wind down month, and this year was no different… or was it? Actually it was 4 days of almost CONSTANT work to complete Floop, my submission for the GMTK Game Jam 2025. This was my first game jam and I learned a lot during it… mostly to manage my time better. In Floop, you play as Gravi as he navigates an unfamiliar place with some… interesting geometry. I drew sprites, programmed everything, and got it all working for the deadline on the 3rd of August! Two of my friends worked on some original music for it too! You can play Floop here.
Only one piece of art this month, A cute little Hornet as we finally got a release date for Silksong. Funnily enough, this piece is oddly reminiscent of something IN Silksong, but that’s spoiler territory. I predicted the future! I should go buy a lottery ticket.
I just LOVE drawing things I’ll regret. Do YOU like drawing things you’ll regret? Anyway, here’s Skweeb as Monokuma. Skwonokuma. I’m sorry.
Hey hey, Silksong was good! Silksong was REALLY good! I like that Trobbio fella, so I drew him! What a diva. The colours on this one are really nice, and I REALLY like the pose! Still holds up even after a few months. My art doesn’t usually do this. I have perfectionism problems.
Halloween, Halloween! The spooky month, with lots of spooky art to compliment it: Pumpskwin is back for another year! Really really happy with the shading on this one. It’s getting ever so closer to how I shade now! Just a little further to go… and a little further I got! A new profile picture for myself despite having made one earlier in the year. Remember what I said about not liking a lot of my previous work? Either way, it’s so, SO close to how I draw now. Next month, I swear.
But that’s not all! I got a new assignment at University this month, a real big one, making a detailed 3D model of anything I wanted! And like a complete buffoon I chose a character model. I needed to choose a character to model and like an UTTER buffoon I chose to create one from the ground up. But it led to one of the most unique characters I’ve ever created. The art speaks for itself here, I am blown away with what I managed to accomplish on it. Now for that model…
Only two pieces this month, but these are two real stand-out pieces! Firstly, something a little bit different. I felt like drawing Troupe Master Grimm from Hollow Knight. But personally, I don’t think he lends well to high contrast shading on account of the fact he’s not a very bright character. So I went with something a little different, and I think I made the right choice here! Lots of detail, lots of grain, lots of space taken up on my computer from how large the project file for this is.
Next up, a new drawing of Chao, and it’s in the art style I use now! I told you we’d get there. I cannot understate just how happy I am with this piece. Even now, I’m still blown away by how lively the style is for this. THIS is what I’ve wanted to do for the entire year, and I finally achieved it. This is why I was so sure about this style. It hasn’t gotten even slightly old for me in the past month, and no other style has done that for me. Expect a lot more art like this.
Chriiiistmas is calling! Did somebody ask for a new seasonal Skweeb design? I wanted to do for Skweeb what I did for him during Halloween: Give him a unique look for the occasion! This time, he looks like a snowman and has candy cane horns! He’s on the nice list this year, I swear.
I also participated in two Secret Santa events this year, but I can't show those here. Depending on the platform you’re reading this on, you can see one of them posted on my profile! So go do that. I will admit, taking on two separate secret santas while also having strict deadlines for University assignments seemed like a really bad idea, and it kinda was! But despite that, I produced two fantastic pieces of art for those events, it just sucks you can’t see them. Oh well…
Of course, I also had the Christmas piece this year, but this one WAS rushed. Not very Christmas-y aside from the presents in the background.
Phew! That’s all 12 months covered! To tell you the truth, this was written in about 2 hours while VERY sleep deprived. I think retrospectives are at their most insightful when you can barely remember what happened 5 minutes ago. I really do hope I can keep this momentum going into the new year, especially as work clears up and I have more time to spend doing whatever it is I want to work on! Going into 2026, I want to work on a lot more video games. As it is currently, I like making them but I don’t do it a lot. But now I have TONS of ideas swishing around in my brain that I want to make reality, so expect to see a lot more games from me in the new year.
Of course, you all know what comes at the end of one of these, I hope. Is this your first one? Either way, the yearly redraw of my first ever art piece, Jack Frost sitting. Not to toot my own horn, but I think this is the BIGGEST improvement I’ve ever had between years. I can’t name a single bad thing about this piece. Just IMAGINE what next year’s could look like!
Thanks for reading. 2026 is creepin’ right up on us!