So, yesterday I procrastinated from work a couple of hours and was toying making a random girl sprite from some sketches I did on Saturday night. Then, as I went back to work on the old Nexus sprite I need to finish, it made me think of all the styles I’ve gone through since I started making sprites.
So I went and looked at all the sprites I’ve done (including the old, the ugly and the unfinished ones! ), and made sort of a timeline C:

(Warning: *long* image-dump post! click to enlarge the pictures.)

2006

Our idea back then was to make a Flash RPG game for Ishtera, so I drew some poses for when the characters would speak on screen. This was my first attempt ever at something that resembled a sprite. Never even finished them.

A friend of mine was taking a videogame course in college and asked me to make some face-changing girl for the game she had to make as an assignment.
She needed a ‘girlfriend’ character, who would react to the player’s performance in game, so I made this redhead girl ^^.

2007

Again for the  Ishtera-game-that-never-was. I have the urge to stab my eyes when I look at them now, though X_x UGH. No wonder my boyfriend kept telling me he wasn’t satisfied with my attempts…

Caramel Mokaccino was born later in 2007. I started making a sprite for Penny (the protagonist), but never finished it. The version on the right was a remake I did in 2008 that I never finished either ^^;

2008

I also had to start planning my diploma project in 2007, so Astre@ was born. The first sprite (Martina, the pink-haired girl with the camera), I did it by the end of 2007 to test the process I’d follow for all the sprites, and I made all the rest in the beginning of 2008.

While I was working on Astre@, I randomly made a ‘paper-doll-like’ sprite one random afternoon, called Celeste, that would have different facial expressions, clothes, and also the colors of every item could be changed without altering the shading (in Photoshop, at least). I distributed it freely on the Lemmasoft Forums for people to use it.

My very first sprite commission was to design and make a sprite for a girl that would show up on a japanese-learning game. It seems the game never got made, though D:

Around the same time, PyTom commissioned me to redesign and draw new sprites for Sylvie, from ‘The Question’, the sample VN shipped with Ren’Py.

2009

By the end of 2008, I was contacted by Winter Wolves to work on The Flower Shop. I worked on the sprites for it through all 2009 very on and off. Here you can see the girls sprites ordered from oldest to newest: Susana (January 09), Jill (April 09), Clara (June 09) and Marian (July 09).

Edit: I had put this in 2008, and they were from 2009, my bad >>;
This was an experiment I never got around to finish D: They looked interesting, though…?

2010

By the end of 2009, my friend Ayu (from Sakevisual) asked me to help her with her remake of Ripples. I planned to make several poses for Kuu, but only ended up making and using this one, which I did in January 2010.

This is the main character of Crimson Midnight, a collab story written by MaiMai that we’d do during January-February that never got very far past draft stage. This is the only sprite I managed to do before we dropped the project.

My first commission as a full-time freelance artist was to work on a series of sprites that started as a single commission, then turned into a BL story and ended up being ‘Nexus’ and having a *lot* of sprites.
I’ve been working on them through all 2010 in between other projects, and I’m still 4 sprites away from completing the last batch! They’re the hardest and most time consuming ones, though, since they’re exactly like the Celeste doll I made.
Here some of the characters I’ve drawn, ordered from oldest to newest: Robin (January to March on and off), Arietta (mostly March), Caspar (August) and Dieser (September).

My first commercial work for Sakevisual was Jisei. It was all done almost within a month and it was a really exciting experience ^^
For the first time since Astre@, I made all of them in one go, so I didn’t have the ‘must-redo-the-ugly-oldest-one-that-looks-weird-compared-to-the-newest-one’ itch.
I got critiques about the style and the bright coloring (not as bright as my older works  imo, though! ) not matching the story very much =(

After Jisei, I started working on Winter in Fairbrook, the sequel/spin-off of The Flower Shop. Like I mentioned on a previous post, I went and remade some of the old sprites along with making new ones. I also made all of them in one go, so no style shifting problems here either, hurray!

Next comes Kansei, which I haven’t got around to dedicate much time. Due the commentaries about the art style on Jisei, I scrapped the sprites I had made from the old ones, and made an effort to shift my style towards something more serious, redrawing the sprites from scratch. What you see here is the new version of ‘???’, the protagonist. The rest is still under production! C:

On the last third of the year, I worked on a traditionally colored VN for the first time: The Parasol Festival. I just finished working on it a few days ago and I can say it was very challenging!
I’ll talk about my adventures and misfortunes doing this one another time, though, probably when it gets released.
I tried to do a style slightly different from my usual one, but in the end my usual way of doing things prevailed ^^; Though the don’t look very bold and bright here next to the digitally-made ones, I can say the actual paintings look very pretty irl!

And this is the sprite I randomly did yesterday for fun. I hope somebody may find a good use for her when I release her PSD file. I want to finish at least one of the other three girls from the original sketch, so I can release both together, but if I don’t get her done soon, I’ll just release this one alone ^^;

And that’s what I’ve done so far!

Well, ok, I omitted one sprite set, that very rough one of Len and Rin that I made to lipsync to a speech and song I made with their demo in 2009 that later I released the PSDs of. If you’ve never seen them, you can find them here. they’re VERY rough, though >>;

I may not improve as fast as other people, and may not be as talented as other people that are like 10 years younger than me and can do way better than me already (oh, the envy!) ; but, as you can see, I really enjoy drawing characters and I want to keep experimenting and  improving while I make art for games and stories people may enjoy ^^ (and somehow managing to make a living out of it if I can!)

I hope you enjoyed the picture dump! C:

Related Posts:

• Glasses guy
• Project update – October 2011
• Barbara~
• Consistency in long term projects – redo or not redo?
• Winter Guys~