So, last time I shared the first character that I often drew as my persona, but if we're being technical, then the very first oc I ever created would be this girl here:

(the original drawings of Kay are long gone by now. I'm never getting those back. this is probably from 2013/14-ish?)

Say hello to Kay Parker. As you can see, she's clearly the result of a middle-schooler learning how to draw anime characters from those infamously bad how to draw manga books. She really had no lore tbh. I guess she was supposed to be an average teenager who gets mixed up in your typical fantasy plot, and her companion would've been this griffin-cat creature who was green for some reason. That's about it really. Well, actually, I ended up reusing Kay for a completely different story a few years later, but at the cost of chibi-fying her. I guess that doesn't sound too bad. 🙂

I think Kay is like, the epitome of my early art where, even with the how-to books I was using, I would just deliberately skip through some steps or follow them enough to get the bare minimum across (I even did this with the basic oval/egg head tutorial), or if something didn't look right, or as good as I had hoped, I just stuck with it. I mean that sounds normal as you're learning how to draw, but I often didn't try to correct it. I just kept learning and drawing different things. I guess the best example of this is Kay's eyes. At first, I was just copying what I saw in the HTDM book. I always, purposely drew Kay's eyes in that cresent J shape, even after I realized that the empty space was supposed to be the highlight/reflection in the eye. And then, Kay's hairstyle doesn't make sense either, but that's just how I tried to make sense of what that book taught.

I think more than anything, the bad habits of my half-assed, self-taught drawing instructions have stuck with me to this day. I'm trying to get better, but I think this is why I have a super slow improvement rate. So, I guess the lesson learned here is be thorough in your studies.