The Beginning of Friday Flashback

I have been thinking constantly all week about how I can find something to write about consistently and that topic to have some substance or at least some entertainment within it. In comes Friday Flashback, a weekly post where I post some of my oldest designs and talk about it, show you guys my progress from then to now, and possibly some good tips of how to do things better or more efficiently.

This is something that I shall regret as soon as I start posting, but I want others to see my improvements and hopefully I can learn a thing or two. Being complacent is bad for your motivation, always strive to be better and stay out of that comfort zone.

I would love to also do "Modern Monday" where I post anything that I have worked on recently, as I have not really posted much art here... Let me know if that is a good idea or not.

P.S. I will have self-designed banners for these weekly posts starting next week.

Shooting back 2-3 years, I started my journey in graphics, not using any web-based platform that had some shapes that you could change color or anything; the full-fledged Adobe experience. I chose this because I knew so many people that used it and it was widely popular. However, I chose to use photoshop not knowing how the other programs worked...and it shows with how low resolution many of my first projects were.

Furthermore, back then I had just recently joined a discord group and wanted to make art for them. Our main game to play was Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege so I chose to take those operator icons and add some flare to them, small things to match whoever it was for. This whole process has became my stress reliever whenever I just want to create but not fully focus on it.

I do realize many of these icons are not 100% me, and its quite lazy but I was new, and its my small outlet to make something for my friends that would appreciate it. Shown below are the references used to create my... "masterpiece"

I took these two above photos and put them together.. yeah this will work well, especially in photoshop with no vectors or actual shapes to manipulate. My intentions were to create something that is a hybrid between the two and hopefully it would look cool, I hate to spoil it but that didn't happen.

It's okay! I know, its absolutely perfect, no need to ever fix this.. thing. I took the head shape from the left picture and took the eyes off of the other, added some grunge and some light flares with a weird perspective pattern to the bottom. It is okay if you are confused, I am too. I am very grateful I got past this stage of trying to piece things together like this because it wont work without a metric butt-load of effort.

Thank you for checking out my first Flashback Friday post, I hope this was somewhat entertaining and comical, because it pained me to bring this back into the public. Was one of your first designs as bad as this? Or was I just really bad when I started?