2022 retrospective -- there's more here than I thought there would be
I forgot to do a Best Nine of 2020 while it was still 2020, so here it is now!
They are chosen by the very subjective means of 1. which ones do I like best and 2. which can be grouped in rows without cutting each other off in thumbnail form by Tumblr’s wacky autoformatting
My 2019 in art -- months where I painted literally nothing are left white
The rows/columns are not equally sized because I don’t know what formatting is
My best nine of 2019, as determined by own subjective estimation of their quality relative to everything else I painted this year
(I made sure to determine when I had posted each of them because my grasp of time is sketchy and left to myself I would no doubt have included works from the last 3 or more years, LOL. But I was shocked to discover I had painted that trilobite beetle this year -- I was sure I had done her earlier.)
<--- Really seem to like having my subjects face this direction
Don’t seem to like doing backgrounds at all, RIP
Tumblr autoformatting is the reason I’m not posting these in a sensible 3x3 grid arrangement; if I were to do that one row would inevitably have at least one picture of a different orientation than the others, which would cut off parts of the other pictures in the thumbnail view.
Is it time for Best Nine yet? There are still, like, two and a half weeks left in the year, but I am unlikely to produce much during that time so I’ll just do it now.
Row 1 - Leaf 9/31, Ammonite, Trilobite Beetle
Row 2 - Leaf Beetles, Coruscant Sunrise ft. Marit
Row 3 - Wild iris, Leaf 25/31
TBH it took some exercise of restraint not to populate this list exclusively with my favorites from Leaftober + the ammonite and the trilobite beetle! I had to think really hard about which paintings I feel like I learned the most from, developed my technique the most doing, to narrow the pool from “all the ones I think are good” to this
I’m still not totally sold on including the one of Marit or the butterfly, because I can see so many flaws on both of them! But I feel like there’s probably value in including them in place of more leaves, for diversity’s sake if nothing else.
(Yes, this is really messy formatting but it’s the best way I can find to display nine images without Tumblr’s auto-formatting cutting off large chunks of any of them)
Favorite Huevembers
(I still have one left but I’ve started it already and I have a strong suspicion it won’t end up being a favorite, LOL)
I really didn’t start to Git Gud(TM) at these until I got to green.
These sweetgum leaves were the ones I found most satisfying to paint
I tried to use the Best of Tumblr tool to determine what my most popular pictures were in each month of 2017, but I realized a lot of the ones it gave me were retrospective posts, containing pictures I’d posted before, so I’m going to do it manually, restricting my pool to first-run posts.
(Under a cut to spare everyone’s dashes)
2017 in Zabraks
(All three Brothers Opress, with three Mauls, two Savages and one Feral; Sugi; and three pictures of two of my Zabrak OCs, Marit and Bez. I’ve drawn a LOT more than I’ve colored, either because I chose not to color a given picture or because I tried and made a mistake I considered fatal to the picture and abandoned it immediately thereafter)
I saw @adversary1 post his Best Nine from 2017, so I figured I’d try to pick what I think mine were!
It was hard to narrow it down, given that I did so much this year. And only some of these are ones I’m sure about ... the knight, yes, definitely, and the water strider, and Umbrella Maul, but of the others I only know I made major progress during my bug paintings, Inktober and Huevember so I’d like to represent those somehow. Those are probably my current favorite bug paintings, all containing something I think I handled best in that particular painting (the water in the water strider one, the background detail in the trilobite beetle one, the shine on the shell of the zigzag beetle, the composition and shadow in the stag beetle one, and the colors and textures in the io moth one), and the cracked kyber crystal is probably my best Inktober drawing, but I’m uncertain about Ossë representing the best of my Huevember paintings. He’s definitely the best one from the Silmarillion series, but I might have some Star Wars ones that are better. He shows up best in thumbnail form, though!