Tyra's 2013 Summary of (Visual) Art

January of this year, I was still using the DSi Art Academy titles, meaning I was limited to paints, a limited palette, and two-three save slots, among other restrictions that are hard to understand without playing the Art Academy games. One of the best works that came out of it this year is "Gaia's Glow," a speedpaint of "Hill Beneath Starry Skies" from Sonic Unleashed that I did from memory. I captured something, because enough people like it; this is actually my fifth-most popular deviation and my fourth most popular piece of visual art.

Feburary was a hard month for me in terms of artwork, but I got some unexpected notoriety from my entry for the Valentine's project, "Bros Before Rose." I think the idea was better than the execution, but it did get me noticed on facebook. The end of February also saw me obtaining Art Academy: Lessons for Everyone, which I started using full-time after that.

March's chosen piece is entitled "Fail," and I almost uploaded it to scrap. It was my first free paint with pastels in the 3DS Art Academy, and my lack of expertise shows... but something about the newness of it and my complete lack of experience with pastels allowed me to create a sense of lighting and color I have been too timid to replicate. "Fail" is my fourth most popular deviation, and my third most popular visual piece.

April was a hard month, but it was when I created my most popular visual piece, Rapid Spin." Done in several fix-layers in digital pastel with minimal referencing, I'm really proud of it. There's not a lot else to say.

May was not a very visual month for me; family trouble took away my desire to paint. Still, I needed a cover for one of my %TrueBlueAsylum character of the month entries, which if memory serves was my first real written entry into that competition. I'm more proud of the story for "Shadow Surpassing Shadow" than the picture, but this is a visual meme. Though I think the story is better, the picture is my tenth most popular visual deviation on the site, and has more faves than the story. 

June was an awful month for me in terms of visual art, but "Breaking out and..." has emotional significance. A speedpaint from June 23rd, I tried to do something different and mostly succeeded. I wanted to capture something with a little more weight than the cheerful, smiling Sonic of most celebratory pictures, to suggest what he meant to me. I thought my troubles were finally over in June, and this picture reflects that. I was, of course, horribly wrong.

July was quiet, almost peaceful. I focused the month on competition, joining several art contests, and I shifted back to paints, away from pastels, out of frustration with the blending glitches in Art Academy. "Steel on Marble" was the product of one of them, and while it did not place in the competition, I feel it's one of my more ambitious pieces in terms of composition and craft, and probably my best visual work to date. The site disagrees: it's only my seventh most popular deviation and sixth most popular visual piece. July also marks the point where my frustration with visual art started to eclipse my enjoyment of it; the "impasto glitch/feature" of Art Academy and my general lack of skill started to grate on me.

August saw me turn away from "realistic" visual arts in favor of chasing after the idea of fauvism, which was presented to me somewhat inaccurately by an Art Academy lesson I completed around that time. I started to recapture what I enjoyed about drawing, but the harsh reactions I got from most people, my mother included, really soured me on visual art in general--if people don't like the only kind of art that's currently fun, why am I striving, you know? Of my "fauvism-inspired" pieces (they are not actually fauvist), my deviantID "Abstraction" was probably the best received. 

September saw my entry into a Pokemon XY contest, the prize of which was to be a new 3DS and copies of the game. I lost the art contest (but won the other two legs), but I got a lot from this painting. The team I set up in "Bien Pensant" suited me well in the actual game when a relative bought it for me. The character I created for this picture and the story that followed, my warped self-insert Tyra, actually ended up being the main character of my NaNoWriMo fanfic. I made a lot of friends in the chatroom that hosted the trivia competition for the contest. I suppose I got better things from the contest in lieu of what I was promised.

October saw no real visual art from me, so I included a picture from the very end of September, done in the Halloween spirit. "Moonlit" was intended as a cover for my story "The Wary Moon," but far predated the story. It was a return to pastels, and it turned out very well. part of why it was so successful is the minimal art style of Rescuebots, which I sought to immitate. Part of why it was successful is the mood I was in painting it. I was tempted to rip off some Metallica lyrics to title it, tee hee. 

November's only attempt at visual arts was an attempt at a trainer card to more easily spread my friend information around for Pokmeon X.

December has had some suggestions of me taking interest in the visual arts again. Mostly this is because of the amazing black and white pieces I've seen on the Miiverse, and my entry for December, "Dawn over Snowbelle," is an attempt to create the same. I think I'm at 15 yeahs for it, too. I tried to make effective use of hatching, inspired largely by the work of ~Adiraiju, and to use good composition to create a sense of depth. It isn't perfect, but I didn't know I could make something like that. 

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