Today, 20 years ago, I uploaded my very first picture to FurAffinity.
I would have never expected, that this would become the starting point of a life altering journey for me. It still feels unreal to look back on over 2300 pictures now and see how it all started. Thanks to everyone who has supported me or been a fan over the years! I cannot thank you and this amazing community enough!
Back in 2006, I didn't own a tablet or a scanner, so I'd cobble together artworks by using photos of male models and animals from google and then redrawing them with my mouse. Afterwards I'd use the polygon selection tool of Photoshop to zigzag shapes and turn that into the lineart. The rest was fairly simple coloring and shading as I already had some knowledge from little bits of videogame modding.
I kept this art process until 2008, when I was gifted my first drawing tablet by my friends Wuschel and Luna. From there all bets were off, as it made drawing much MUCH easier than using a mouse.
Revisiting the old image and drawing it anew was a very interesting experience. I tried to keep some elements the same, for example I had totally forgotten that I had given the tiger in the original a notched ear already, something that my fursona has kept all these years.
Another thing that I was debating with was how hard I should try and recreate the original image. In the end, I figured it would be better and more fun to just draw it in my current art style and just enjoy the process. I don't need this to be the representation of my skill ceiling at the moment, because I feel then it would just be purely for showing off and I didn't want that.
In the end I really like how this turned out and I want to reiterate how thankful I am for the last 20 years of my life, having found this community and being able to share artwork and make friends through. To the next 20 years!
Enjoy!