Middle School Drawing Archive and Quick Review

This was a period when drawing was becoming part of my daily routine, and outwardly it was still a continuation of my elementary school drawings. Still, I remember drawing while on school retreats, during the time between arriving at school and morning assembly, and during breaks and lunch — I kept drawing in every spare moment, which shows that I was developing a strong attachment to it. ↩

This is exactly the kind of thing that made me hesitate about whether to post it. My sensibilities and tastes back then are different from now, so I naturally wondered whether a drawing this trivial was worth posting despite the embarrassment. Ultimately, I decided to post it — thinking I shouldn’t judge by today’s standards. And honestly, it’s not just me; everyone around that age has corners like this. That aside, back then I was proud of this drawing, thinking I’d drawn it well for once. ↩

I started learning Russian in October 2015. It wasn’t because I had foreign friends or was going abroad — I was just fascinated by the idea of learning a foreign language from a young age. I wanted to understand it out of pure curiosity, and among languages, I remember starting Russian because I heard it was difficult to learn and thought that sounded cool. This is why occasional Russian doodles with incomprehensible scribbles appear next to my drawings. ↩

The best thing about learning Russian was that it expanded my interests into linguistics and the humanities, and I started managing my interests more diachronically. For example, modern linguistics classifies Russian under the Indo-European family, Balto-Slavic branch, Slavic group, East Slavic subgroup from a comparative linguistics perspective. From there, I became curious about what cognate languages belong to each classification, what they have in common and what differs, and how languages came to branch off. This is also why I know about the Cyril brothers, the Tatar yoke, the Goryeo carrot kimchi, Russian Jews in Israel, the chaos of 1990s Russia right after the Soviet collapse, and more specifically, that the Polish greeting “Cześć” shares the same root as the Russian word “Честь” meaning honor, and that Russia shares a medieval state heritage called Kyivan Rus’ with Ukraine and Belarus. ↩

Drawing military illustrations was partly influenced by FPS games like Battlefield, but during this period I was also influenced by the anthology project “Combat Maid Company” and its core illustrators like KWS and Shino. Every time I drew, I was conscious of the Picatinny rails, gear, and clothing folds that these illustrators emphasized in their work, and I felt a sense of pride following in their footsteps. ↩

I drew an enormous amount during this period. During summer vacation in 2016 in particular, I remember filling every page of thin sketch pads without any blank space, stacking up about three of them. Looking back, it was a period of intense obsession, and I left behind a lot of work — it’s a shame I can’t include the ones from high school along with these, as I lost those notebooks. ↩

A characteristic of this period is that military drawings became more professional and context-specific, while also branching out from stale military themes into other subjects like Undertale. Regarding the latter, other classmates besides me also liked it, so I drew it often, and I remember playing around drawing Overwatch heroes like Genji and Bastion, even if I didn’t include those here. ↩

9th grade is the period I remember most vividly. The past is always romanticized, but I think it was the last year I lived stably as a proper student in a proper school, so I’m especially attached to it. A warm, stable orange-tinted atmosphere is particularly visible in the mood of the drawings too. There are signs of trying new things in terms of subject matter and composition, and perhaps because of the leisure in life, shitposts are scribbled all over. ↩

One afternoon in the fall of second semester, about three guys and three girls were gathered, chatting and drawing. One of them was staring intently at this drawing and quietly murmured, “How about becoming a police officer or something later?” It’s a trivial thing, but this drawing brings that moment back to me. ↩

While archiving, I also went through my high school practice pads and discovered something. The “drawing I make when I have nothing to draw” first appeared in 9th grade, then consistently continued through high school and into relatively recent times, up to around 2022. For example, in the First Digital Drawing Collection post on this blog, there’s an image caption that says “The kind of drawing you make when you have absolutely nothing else to do,” which has been there since the draft — I think it’s an extension of the same tendency. I was surprised to discover what seems like a subconscious pattern. ↩

I think my art style and line-work ability were largely completed during this period, both then and now. I will archive and post my high school drawings in the same way within the next two years, but there probably won’t be as dramatic a difference as the change over these three years of middle school. Maybe there won’t be much difference from how I draw now, either. Perhaps it’s because high school left me with no free time, but in retrospect, it was a small and brief inflection point. ↩