Evaluating my childhood artwork: Nostalgic memories and creative milestones 🎨

That does not look like a horse, that looks like some kind of lizard! God, you stop that, stop it right now, stop! What’s up guys, it’s the holiday season, happy holidays, Merry Christmas! I’m feeling good, it’s a beautiful day today, but not as beautiful as you, sorry.

But I want to do something special today, I want to give you guys a gift. So many of you have been asking to see my old art for the past two years, so I was like, you know what, let’s do it. Um, yeah, this is going to be an embarrassing video, but it’s not on brand for me unless I’m embarrassing myself in front of hundreds of thousands of people online, that’s just who I am. So let me turn on this camera and let’s get started and there oh, and for the sake of my dignity, this is the work that I do now, in case you guys don’t know. Alright, let’s get started. We’re going to go chronologically from when I was a tiny baby all the way up to my high school arc.

This is my first Sketchbook, I kept it from 2008 to about 2010, so all the drawings that you see here are from when I was 10 to maybe 11 years old. Are you guys ready for the first page? Check it out, it’s an unfinished drawing of Optimus Prime. We are off to a fantastic start, just look at the line art on that, incredible! We’re only like 2 minutes into this video and I’m utterly appalled. So when I was a 10-year-old boy, I had a crazy fascination with anything robotic. Check out these vehicles and Transformers, I loved Transformers, this is just pages upon pages full of Transformers, it’s crazy. Like I gave them rankings, they had a little bit of a backstory in my head. This was a lot of fun, like they always turned into different vehicles and I would try to incorporate the vehicle parts in some of the parts of the robots. You know, there’s not too much refinement in terms of my line art, in terms of my shading or anything like that, and a lot of these guys are Decepticons, it seems like I’ve always had a fascination with the villains. And of course, plenty of unfinished drawings, Decepticon, that’s an Autobot, oh look at that, there’s some faces. I think I just found the first skull of my enemy ever, he has no cranium, where’s his cranium? It’s pretty cool though, I was a huge fan of the Transformers movies when I was young, the Michael Bay movies were just so cool to me. I mean, for the longest time I was kind of embarrassed about that, I kept it hidden, I didn’t really show anyone what I did, but not today, no, no, no, no, no. Look at this guy, that’s a pretty cool design, bro’s got a huge shield, I mean that’s kind of sick. Oh man, you know what, these must be inspired by Halo, this looks like a Halo alien ship and these are, I don’t know, robots, tons of robots. When I was younger, I love drawing robots, anything mechanical, and they’re all built for war. Unfortunately, I was a menace from a very young age, look at all these weapons, what a disturbed young man, oh hold up, what the heck is that? This might be like some of my earliest drawings of people, look at that, we got some characters, we got some poses and we’ve got this character design, I think, you know, now that I see this, he might have been based on my friend Dean, he was also an artist, but this is not, definitely not the most flattering drawing of him, sorry Dean.

Okay, so I think at this point Avatar came out, I was really inspired by Avatar, you get all these gunships and these mining machines. I must have been like 11 by then, a lot of inspiration from Avatar just building out a world similar to that. Look at all these bombs, yeah, I was designing ships that were able to just absolutely annihilate the blue people. Look at the weapons on these guys, my goodness, I was such a threat to society, just an unhinged 11-year-old child. Here’s some more robots, but these guys were aliens, basically in my head, I made up this alien invasion where they just came down and decided to destroy Earth, for what reason I have no idea, but these are the aliens that came down to try to destroy us. Yeah, I got some crazy weapon designs here, oh, oh, oh, that must be a creature design based on Avatar, very disturbed. But you see, I was definitely a lot more comfortable drawing mechanical stuff as opposed to things that are alive and organic, I barely drew any people. This was probably about the best that I could do, there’s a chicken, that’s a hairless chicken, and this is the funniest thing, at the back of this book I just have dates written down for when I got my favorite toys that I wanted. What an interesting kid you were, Sam.

So, I really love this Sketchbook, I feel like it showcases the beautiful imagination of an absolute menace to society, it’s your guys’ fault as a society that I was able to grow into what I am today. I should have been nipped in the bud, they should have never allowed me to exist. I’m going to give this a 10 out of 10, thank you little Sam for blessing me with this.

So with that 10 out of 10, now we’re moving on to middle school, that’s right, I went to middle school, basically it’s grade seven to grade eight, from about 12 to 14 years old. Here’s the first page, it’s a marine of some kind, I think I might have been playing Call of Duty back then, yep definitely playing Call of Duty back then. Look at all these guns, like a shotgun, is this one’s actually sick, it’s got a dragon on the back. I don’t know if you guys can see that, but look at the dragon, that is a sick weapon, I mean the horns will probably do some damage to your own hand, but. And we got some alien weapons here too, that’s pretty cool. And there’s this big guy, this is a Russian guy apparently, and once again aliens, but this time a little bit more refined. Look at the shading on that, it’s just still unfinished, got some designs here for alien head, alien warriors just in full armor, pretty cool looking. So basically, I did this thing where if I didn’t want to finish a drawing, I would just do this and pretend like he goes invisible. Why spend a lot of time on drawing when drawing invisible, huge brain. This is kind of cool, this is like an alien dog, look at that thing, this thing looks vicious, it’s kind of disturbing too, I’m not going to lie, I did a lot of disturbing drawings when I was a young man.

Okay, this is really nice, I’ve got like some ship designs, I’ve got some scenes, some battle scenes, there’s like some alien giant spacecraft that are here to invade Earth. This is a cool ship design though, but um, yeah just I loved War, oh yeah I remember him, he’s one of the good guys, oh my God wait this one’s even better, look at this, I mean for like a 13-year-old boy that’s kind of sick. Check out that ship design, I feel like when I got to middle school a lot of my drawings just became so much more refined, you know the designs and stuff seem a little bit more purposeful. Again, there’s a lot of guns here and I really do like some of these designs, this must be an alien weapon because of that weird handle, I remember sometimes I would draw one of these guys, I’d create one of these designs and then I would just visualize them, I just like make these imaginary battles in my head on my walk home from school. Not to sound like a boomer, but that was boredom at work. When you’re bored as a child, you can actually foster your creativity and imagination, but nowadays all these iPad kids, like they got no time to think, they’re just consuming like zombies. When I have kids, I’m not going to give them iPads, they’ve got to learn to be bored. I think this about brings us to the end of the Alien series, and this is now the start of the fantasy series, as I believe this is when I started playing Dark Souls.

Yeah, this is definitely when I started playing Dark Souls, look at this guy and oh my God, can you guys see the details in that, that is crazy, there’s like a floating castle too, that’s actually insane, I’m slightly impressed, that looks pretty cool. This is another assassin design that I actually ended up finishing the shading for, I definitely didn’t have as much knowledge about fantasy and medieval type armor, so you can see some of these armor plates almost look like modern combat armor. There’s some OC designs, some earlier faces, I would say that I had pretty solid shading for this age, but um, again, more faces here, even more faces here, just more designs for characters. I think my stories for these characters were they were supposed to be like a band of assassins, might have been slightly inspired by the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim, because I was so into that game back then. But, um, this is a really cool drawing, not bad at all. Oh wow, another good one, so in middle school I’m starting to draw more people, more organic shapes, less robots, and this is ridiculous but here this might have been one of my earlier attempts at drawing a horse, and you can see it just didn’t go that well. That does not look like a horse, that looks like some kind of lizard. So now that I see these drawings, I actually remember the process for drawing them, and I think the last one I didn’t use a reference and I was like why does this horse look like a Komodo dragon, so in the second one I actually used a reference for the face of the horse, and I think it turned out so much nicer. But again, either this person is only 3 years old or this horse is just absolutely massive because the scale is so off here. There’s another face, kind of stiff, but you know, I will say it’s very nicely shaded. So here’s some attempts for like concept drawings, this is towards the end of the Sketchbook by the way. This must have been when I was around 13 years old probably, you can see there was an attempt at doing some expressions, just didn’t turn out the best, but these were some of my earlier face drawings. There’s a big wolf, you got some cool creature designs here, look at that. Oh my God, a furry, have I been a furry this whole time? There’s a samurai that I didn’t finish, this was the beginning of my fascination with samurai. This is the final page of the Sketchbook, god what an edgy little kid. So that’s my middle school Sketchbook, I feel like you can definitely see the improvement in the art, and there’s something truly amazing about this unapologetic creativity. I’m going to give that a 10 out of 10. Obviously, I was a little bit more conscious at this age, so it’s not as cute as the one before, but now I want to show you guys some loose pieces, some paintings, we’ve only been seeing sketches so far, so you guys probably think all I do is sketch, no sir, no, no, no, no, no, I’ve got here some old watercolor paintings of mine.

With most of these paintings, they were actually done during a tutor class, so basically what happened was my mom signed me up for a class with this old Asian guy every single week, so I just go over, sit down, and just draw or paint for 3 hours straight, no breaks, no playtime, no snacks, just drawing for 3 hours straight until my mom comes to pick me up. Here’s some watercolor paintings that I want to show you guys. So this one’s from 2011, March 5th, when I was younger, I think watercolor was definitely my favorite medium, and this was, I believe based on a famous painting. I did a lot of studies of famous paintings just to understand colors a little bit better. I believe this one here is also a study of a famous painting, you can see the details here look really good. This was from 2010 when I was a little bit younger, it might have been one of my earlier watercolor pieces. I think this was based on a famous painting as well, and I mean I love the fog here, just the creepy atmosphere, I really like that. Some more still lifes, you know what, I find really interesting is that if you look at these watercolor pieces, let’s see if we can catch that, but you guys see the pencil lines here that kind of show through the colors that actually kind of reminds me of the way I still paint today where my sketch lines are literally visible on top of the colors. So, I don’t know if I do it intentionally now or if it’s like a subconscious thing from way back here that kind of carried over, but it’s kind of become a part of my painting style now, it’s very interesting. Here’s another really cool piece; you’ll also be able to see a higher resolution of this in my art book. Just gorgeous, gives you the feeling of a Summer morning. This is from 2011, I was about 13 years old, this was my first acrylic painting. My very first one, I think I remember trying it out and thinking, my God, this medium is so much more forgiving than watercolor, but I think I still ended up liking watercolor more. Here’s another watercolor piece, and you can see again see the sketch lines showing through the colors, so this batch of paintings from grade 6 to grade 8, I would give a 10 out of 10. I genuinely think that if I saw a 12-year-old painting stuff like this today, I’d be a little bit scared, I would probably call animal control.

And that brings us to high school, so this is going to be my high school sketchbook now. So far, if you guys are seeing these pieces and you’re like, man, I wasn’t doing this at 12, and you’re starting to feel disappointed or discouraged, stop that nonsense. Here’s the thing that I always tell people, that you got to understand is Artistic level and age shouldn’t be intrinsically tied together. It’s not about your actual age, it’s about how many years you’ve been practicing, how many years you’ve been learning. And for me, I started learning art in China from before I was even in elementary school, and I’m not talking about fun kid art classes where you just go and you doodle, you do some arts and crafts and you go home happy. In Chinese art classes, they get there, and it’s like a military boot camp, okay, they sit you down and they slap you over the head with art fundamentals, they just destroy you, they beat you, they might actually beat you. So, I had years of that before I came to Canada, and in Canada, I was still learning. So, if you’re someone who’s like 20 right now, and you’re like, I can’t even do that, just ask yourself how many years have you been seriously studying art. If it’s not that many then you can’t compare your work with a 12-year-old who’s been studying for like 7 years. Anyways, with that out of the way, now let’s move on to the high school Arc.

This is my high school sketchbook, I got here some character designs, some world designs, some creature designs here. I think those look pretty cool, I would have never shown this stuff, like even 3 years ago, but now I feel like I just, I’m just so used to getting embarrassed that it doesn’t even register in my brain anymore. Yeah, I think this must be some kind of Elf, like they’ve literally got cat feet, I don’t know if you can see that but maybe I am a furry. These Armor Designs are really cool for the elves, I think a really big inspiration for me back then was some of the concept art and prop designs that were done for the Hobbit movies. I definitely drew a lot of inspiration from that for the Elven armor. here’s another character drawing, that’s pretty cool, I’m not exactly sure what her story was meant to be, but I think my high school drawings of people are just a lot more refined compared to the years before. This one looks kind of cool, even though it’s like unfinished, it’s more of a Chinese-inspired armor style I think. Oh yeah, look at these Armor Designs, that is sick!

So, a lot of these sketches you’re going to be able to see in my art book as well. But I think in this Sketchbook, I really did a ton of World-building. I tried to essentially just create this whole fantasy Universe, you know, I designed some castles here, there are some dragons, I think they were like the Elder, the gods, dragons or something. Here are some Armor Designs, look at this ballista, you’ve got some more character and creature designs, very, very nice. There’s a female lizard and a male lizard, I love them lizard people, there’s some different Warriors from different kingdoms, I was a big fan of drawing armor and weapons, and kind of showing a Kingdom’s culture through the design of the armor and the weapons. I do feel like things that are used for Warfare just give you so much insight into the culture of an Empire. There’s some drawings of assassins here, look at the number of eyes on this guy, that’s crazy. Here’s some more Armor Designs, there’s some maps and what the heck is that, a random drawing of Walter White? Oh, here’s another unfinished drawing of Walter White, what’s going on here? And most of the Sketchbook is not actually filled out, so I definitely didn’t have as much time to draw in high school, but at the very back of this big Sketchbook there’s some more portraits, some more faces. So, any of these shaded sketches that you see that I’ve drawn there’s no smudging at all, whether it be with a paper towel or with my fingers, none no smudging it was all done just by applying pressure to the pencil. Cool, I’m going to give this one an 8 out of 10, mainly because I was actually unable to fill it out, I just wish that there was a little bit more done in here, but the stuff that is here, it’s very good, it makes me very nostalgic and I do like it a lot.

So there you guys go, there’s some Sam lore that basically covers from late elementary school all the way up to the end of high school. I would show you guys some of my earlier digital paintings, but I don’t have those files anymore. They are stored on a computer tablet and that tablet won’t turn on