My deviantART Story

Happy Birthday dA! I can’t believe that dA is now 14! 

I signed up for my first deviantART account on October 16, 2005, after spending a couple of weeks of lurking and admiring all the beautiful art on the site. I can’t remember how I ever found this site nearly a decade ago, but at the time I was really into fan art and I think that I must have followed a link from someone’s website over to here. 

When I first joined, I was in college and I had just switched my major over to art and I wanted a place where I could post some of my creations and get some feedback. Over the past 9 years, I’ve learned a lot from this site and the dA community. The tutorials that people submit to this site are absolutely invaluable – everything from drawing, to digital painting, to html, and editing journal skins.

More recently I’ve been fascinated with animated .gifs but I never knew how they were made or how exactly to make them, or even what program to use, until I ran into a few tutorials on here and eventually learned how to create them in Photoshop.

First Try

The first animated .gifs that I tried making were
fairly simple and contained only a 2-3 frames:  

   

Second Try

After some experimentation, I tried some new things,
such as animating single letters and fading text:  
                  
         

Using Photos

I later tried making one out of photos that
I took while drawing a sea shell.

Still Learning

I haven't had much time to create any .gifs lately,
but over the weekend I decided to try making
a new one. It's a lot larger and longer than
any other ones that I've made and it was far more
complicated (it took nearly 3 days to make).

In this one I had a lot of fun experimenting with different
things and doing things I had never tried before.