It's a bit like a High-School reunion. There are some things that look great, other things that really show their age, and some others that are so completely unrecognizable that you're not even sure they were in your class.

I just recently got Photoshop 7, and I was finally able to delve into a folder of art I was working on some 10 years ago. These files were created using PhotoDeluxe 3.1, and I haven't been able to get that program to run on a computer since upgrading to WinXP. Thus, when I was finally able to open them using the new(er) program, some of what I found was quite shocking(ly bad).

Of course, some of it is still decent, but even the best drawings have obvious flaws that I was either too blind to see, or too frustrated to fix. Now the first part of that is, obviously, on me. I knew about many of the flaws back then. However, I do realize that a lot of them are due to a limitation of my equipment - I had no tablet. Anyone who has ever tried to draw anything using a mouse will understand when I say... sometimes (most of the time, really), you just left the flaws because it was too tedious to fix.

Some years later, I finally have the chance to explore the ghosts of my artistic past, and it's quite frightening - and illuminating. Some of the drawings are plainly unusual creations out of my own mind while others are obviously fan-art - all in various states of completion. I'll have my work cut out for me going back to salvage some of these images - several of which still relate to things I'm working on now.

Having already dipped into them and started trying to make corrections using my tablet, I wanted to make sure the horrifyingly bad original depictions were retained, so I'm going through to make .png files of each one for posterity. Some of which I pieced into a collage seen below.

From left to right, top to bottom:
A rendition of Tatl from LoZ:MM (barely recognizable), Aeris as a Turk (I think she's reading), A disfigured woman I created (she has a name, but I won't speak it), Ashton Anchors (from Star Ocean Second Story), A line-drawing of a Knight (own creation), A shirtless Sailor (Again, with a name I won't say), Adelbert Steiner (from FFIX) drawn with a semi-realistic body shape, A staff-wielding woman (I forgot her name), A very angry man's outline (he never had a name), and, finally, Solid Snake (This concept was used for my Solid Snake versus Optimus Prime clips in AFD 5).

Anyway, I thought I'd share this archaeological find with the likes of you, the NG public. I might be back in the near future with some updates on this historic occasion, but... with my track record, I doubt it.