I’ve always been into the arts. You can look back through year after year of grade school scrapbooks, or old classwork craft assignments. No matter what the rubric said, I loved to let the creativity flow, and usually that translated to good grades, so on top of enjoying the creative process, I was also constantly reassured I was very good at it. When I was 12, I spent all year making pictures of Pokemon, Mario, anime characters, Neopets, Shrek, you name it – and compiling the pictures into a homemade coloring book. I was so proud of my art and thrilled that a few people bought copies of the coloring book at a summer yard sale. A few random households around my hometown had a coloring book with my art in it.

Looking back at it objectively, it’s bad! Proportions are horrendous. Anatomy is nonexistent. I’m not convinced I knew what a human girl should look like, but you know, that may actually not be my fault (I watched a LOT of magical girl anime growing up). But above all else, it was shameless. I wasn’t afraid of my art being bad. I just wanted to see what I could draw.

Something changed in high school. I had made some new friends, and one of them was also pretty good at drawing. But he knew how to draw a lot of things that I didn’t. He understood poses, and anatomy, and shading. I found my confidence wavering; eventually, I felt like my art wasn’t good enough to bother to show anyone, because ultimately, his was better. I put the pencil down for a while.

My partner and I started streaming on Twitch as a side gig in 2021. There’s always a hope that it can turn into something financially sustainable, but until then, it’s a powerful, multi-pronged creative outlet. For my first subathon, I thought a good goal might be to show off and release some of the art from that coloring book. People sometimes like to embarrass the streamers, so – ha ha, let’s laugh at some cringe childhood artwork – it felt like a good goal. But even when I was showcasing the art on stream, I never felt embarrassed. I looked at my old art endearingly. I wasn’t exactly proud of the art itself, but I was proud of myself for drawing whatever I wanted and challenging my comfort zone.

As a content creator, there have countless opportunities for me to make my own art. Overlays, emotes, posters, advertisements, talk sprites, panels – the list goes on and on. To start, I decided to buy an overlay set from Etsy, and once I had unlocked some emote slots, I commissioned an artist friend for those. I was able to sketch out very rough thumbnails of what kind of emote I wanted, but I had no digital art tools or skills to make the emotes myself. I also lacked some confidence. It’s easy to draw rough thumbnails for an artist to use to make your commission. Nobody else has to see the thumbnails! “Rough” is in the name, so it’s expected that they don’t look that good. A few people in our Discord still said they looked cute, but I preferred the final version my emote artist did. He took my vision and brought it to life.

Sure, I could do some very basic posters and schedule graphics using Paint.NET. I had an eye for art; I remembered a lot of what I had learned in the school art classes I excelled in. But I was okay that I wasn’t a digital artist. I had spent a few years in high school drawing OC’s in MS Paint using a mouse, and it left a lot to be desired. I had just accepted the fact that digital art wasn’t in my particular wheelhouse. I had plenty of other hobbies I could turn to. But something happened at the end of 2021 – some synapses in my brain that were long thought dead started firing. My job was draining me. The best way I could see to pull myself up and keep moving forward was artistic expression. 

I wanted 2022 to be the year of art. And instead of some sort of gimmicky new year’s resolution, this time, I kept it simple: this year, I just want to do more art. I’ve tried experiments with daily poems and daily sketches before, but it often toes the line between creative expression and chore. This time, I simply wanted to fill the year with more art than I had the year before. I was doing silly little post-it note doodles at work. I was doing pencil and paper comics like I used to in grade school. My mom had bought me many packs of Sharpies and I was determined to use them. I practiced a few “draw this in your style” challenges and started teaching myself art again – how to create shamelessly.

I wanted to push myself to new heights for the Year of Art (as the year went on, it became a branded, official movement ™). I started watching other digital artists on Twitch to see how they worked. There were multiple “aha” moments as I learned their processes and realized how many techniques I had been missing out on nearly ten years ago. To my surprise, my sister had an old Wacom art tablet that she wasn’t using, so I picked that up, along with Clip Studio Paint, and set out to draw. Emotes were an easy starting point – I was still not very confident in things like dynamic poses and human anatomy. If I could draw Pokemon with a silly face to get the hang of the new tools of the trade, then so be it. I was even able to put some emotes on my Ko-Fi to make a little side money while I continued to learn. And I’ve learned a lot – about color composition, about emote reading and space management. Let it be known that 6 months after I started drawing emotes for my Ko-Fi, I already want to fix up the first set I made. I am currently resisting the urge to retouch my own art ad infinitum.

I was starting to learn the basics of digital art when Twitch added animated emote slots for anyone who was a Twitch Affiliate. Some of the animated emotes are rather simple – it’s an arm moving up or down, or a character bouncing ambiently. Still, I decided I’d rather commission another artist friend for my animated emotes. I didn’t feel confident that I would be able to create something that would match my vision. But I was getting really good at finding and sending references, thumbnails, anything and everything to the people I was commissioning. 

My first bit of “animation” this year was attempting to assemble a gif of my stream schedule, frame by frame. It was a little choppy and messy, but it was my first attempt. And I learned pretty quickly that there were different things I could adjust within my gif assembler, like the speed of each frame. I also got to watch some emote animation process streams. And I got curious. Could I actually animate something? I started by breaking a gif of a sleeping piranha plant down from 40 frames to 4 basic frames and drawing them myself. It was rough, but the motion was there. Huh, I thought, I guess I’m an animator now.

That curiosity did not end there. I’ve animated three emotes this year. I have multiple sets of emotes available on Ko-Fi. I’ve had a few commissions, enough that I’m creating my own commission advertising posts and raising my prices a bit. This year marks the start of my career as a hybrid streamer – someone who streams using a face camera and also a virtual avatar, or PNG-tuber. Guess who drew the virtual avatar? I even taught myself some basic video editing, something I dreaded, so that I could post some TikToks. I kept learning, upgrading softwares, and eventually made my own trailers and short-form content. The unexpected champion of the Year of Art is curiosity. What am I actually capable of, if I practice and learn? 

Curiosity births creativity. When you take a moment and allow yourself to be curious about what you could accomplish, you’ll find that even if the outcome doesn’t exactly match your original vision, it’s something tangible that only exists because you decided to make it so. On the other side of the coin, comparison is the silent killer of creativity. When you look at the things you have made only to determine it was wasteful because something better already exists, you are taking your own time and energy for granted. For years, I had stifled my artistic talents because I felt like my drawings weren’t as good as my friend’s, or family’s, or other artists on the internet. I let that self-consciousness smother my creativity to the point where I didn’t want to draw because I was no longer curious about what I could make. I had already written it off as mediocre.

Spending 2022 rekindling that spark of curiosity and embracing the art I used to create has been cathartic. I’ve made a lot of art this year. Not all of it is great, and that’s okay! I’m learning what works and what doesn’t. I can still say that my childhood art is objectively and technically bad. But I’ve had an entire year to practice, and I love the improvements I see. Which is why no matter what 2023 brings… art is in my heart.