A super fun walk through of how my art has changed over the years
check it out if you’re interested!
I’ve always drawn things as a kid, I honestly can’t remember a time in elementary school where I wasn’t getting in trouble for drawing all over something. I always drew traditionally until my grade six “graduation” when my parents got me an Ipad 2. I got to choose one app to buy, and that app was Idraw, a simple Vector-based drawing app that immediately took over my life.
I would draw all sorts of stuff on that app from Nyan cat to my Minecraft avatar. And then I found the horse show. Feeling Pinkie Keen was my gateway drug to horse fandom. I watched all of season 1 (which was all that was there at the time) and my little 12 year old mind got an amazing idea: I’LL MAKE MY OWN PONY. Her name is Firefly and I still love her, fight me.
I drew a TON of drawings of her (which I don’t have anymore ;n; ) It wasn’t until I started looking for information on season 2 that I discovered the fandom: mostly through YouTube videos of askblog dubs. And then I found DEVIANTART and I was hooked. I started actually posting my drawings around 2012-2013 I remember my only art goal was to get into EQD’s Drawfriend
And then came the ask blog. After discovering Jan Animation’s Ask The Crusaders, I knew I had to do it. Here are some of my first few posts. It’s obvious that even from a young age, I craved that horse clout.
And then I got THE ACTUAL DRAWING TABLET, my good old Wacom Bamboo that my mom picked up at winners or something. I torrented Sai and got right to doing my first raster-based drawings
By late 2013 I was in much better shape vector drawing wise, and my ask blog picked up! I’m still proud of the adventures these three dorks went on, I even still have a huge archive of fanart of them <3 It was also around this time that my first version of “Neko” appeared and I came up with the name “NekoSnicker”
Here’s some more of my early sai Work. Some big inspirations for me at the time were Jitterbugjive and DVixie (at the time, DennyButt)
2014 was a lot of askblog stuff and learning more about Sai. I was just watching ponies and chatting on skype with my other horse art friends like ShibaRoll (ThunderDaze at the time) and TheLikeableArtist. I think this is the year I made my Neko-Snicker tumblr account started doing paid commissions as well.
By late 2014, my ask blog was at an all time peak and my style had gotten a lot better and I had started getting good at animating. I was involved in projects and other blogs and was posting art regularly every day.
December 2014 would be last time I updates Ask-Firefly and the last time I had any presence on my other accounts for about seven months. Needless to say, I was going through some hard life times. When I did finally come back, I had completely changed the direction I wanted my art to go (before and after break):
I still feel awful for leaving without a word for so long, 15 year old me was not kind to do that.
It was during this break that I started my Ask Student Luna Blog. I think I hid under another name because I was scared of people not liking my new art style. All I wanted to do was use harsh shading, interesting shapes and exaggerated faces. The freedom of a new name gave me the confidence to do this.
Student Luna really was the art outlet I needed at the time and I am soooo happy I deviated from the on model, cute style I was using before because it turns out, people liked this side of me a lot more. I gained 12,000 followers over the span of a year, 4X as much as I ever had with Firefly. And it was so much more fun.
Of course, when I did come back to my “NekoSnicker” accounts, I cut Neko’s hair and made her into who she it today to fit my new aesthetic a bit more
And from then on, I wasn’t afraid to experiment and draw less cute and more abstract horses
The last few years has really just been a steady pace of me improving my style and gaining more of a presence. I also met these two losers who have each been a big part of my art journey: Modularpone and Anticular
Thanks for reading about my art journey! There were highs and lows but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I am now happy where I am and excited to see where I’ll go next. Let’s finish off with some of my favs from the last year:
