Time Machine (Ep.1): The Tween Era (Patreon)

Helloooo Patrons, and welcome to our new mini blog series, the Ragonia Time Machine! In this series we're going to travel back in time to different eras in my art history to take a look at my sketches, doodles, pieces, and projects, and see how the years stacked up to make me the artist that I am today. For each era I'll sort through my old art and share them in general categories or themes.

I hope you enjoy seeing some art and pictures that are usually not shared in our world of Perfect Aesthetic Art Timelines. I hope the series can be a good reminder that there's room for awkwardness, experimentation, incompletion, and even outright failures in the life of an artist. I've shared a lot about how much pressure I feel as a professional artist, and it feels so refreshing to look back at a time when I could just do my best and have fun doing it.

So please, step into the Time Machine! 

Help yourself to a Vitamin Water or Starbucks Vanilla Bean Frappuccino. Straighten your side bangs, put on your mall logo shirts and ballet flats. Take a hot pink iPod Nano loaded up with this Spotify playlist of songs I listened to as a tweeny bopper. And start feeling bad about every single facet of your changing appearance because where we're going, you don't need body positivity! 

It's time... We're blasting back to 2006-2008 - The Tween Era.

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Quick context: I was born in 1993, so I was a middle schooler/tween from 2005-2008, in a middle class family with two younger sisters, living in the northern Virginia exurbs of the U.S. capital of Washington D.C. 

I was encouraged for my art as far back as I can remember, and just loved to draw for fun. As a kid I did a lot of copying from media reference: I drew Pokemon on the walls of our unfinished basement, traced my Lisa Frank Folders, copied Yu-Gi-Oh characters in chalk on the driveway. 

I started making art by drawing from the art that I saw regularly, which was the media around me- fan art!

By middle school I was pretty split between wanting (and failing) to be a Pretty, Stylish, Cool Girl with lots of friends and boyfriends and sleepovers like magazines and movies told me to be, and my other obsessions with nerdy shit like Neopets, Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar the Last Airbender, Harry Potter, and video games. (Man your tween years really are such a time of wildly flailing identity.)

Harry Potter self-insert fan art, probably 5th grade.

Pirates/ anime cross over fan art, 6th grade.

Kingdom Hearts Fan Art of Sora, 7th grade.

Some kind of made-up nerdy/cool version of me and a character from Kingdom Hearts 2, 7th grade. Pure internet.

An Avatar the Last Airbender OC, 7th grade.

What I can only guess is an anthropomorphized version of my Xweetok Neopet in... Pirates of the Caribbean era clothing? 7th grade.

A werewolf OC I drew for the Twilight universe... no kidding. 2008?
I drew this character on an airplane, and the lady sitting next to me saw I was drawing and said she wanted to commission me to draw her favorite shoes because she collected shoes. She didn't.

I loved to draw different "aesthetics" before there was a name for "aesthetics". Looks like I was exploring my tweenage understanding of fashion through art. 

The five aesthetics of the apocalypse, 7th grade.

Apparently the five styles according to middle school me were... 

Pac-Sun, Lazy Environmentalist T-shirt, Scene, Bend It Like Beckham, and 2007 Preppy.

Cottagecore, Y2K, Dark Academia, and E-Girl WHOMST?

More fashion drawings, this time in Goth vs. WASP, 7th grade.

An "opposites" face and a drawing of my dog, 7th grade.

I loved to draw people in "opposite" aesthetics. I don't know why. Analyze me.

Rare! MS Paint drawing from 2007!

I drew this in Microsoft Paint on my parents computer with my MOUSE and CURSER thank you very much. 

Born artist. Much dedication. Much fashion sense.

As any self-respecting child who showed an interest in art, I, of course, got a lot of those basic How to Draw books, and drew lots of shaded spheres, single eyes, and fruit bowls, like "real artists" where supposed to. But my favorite subject was obviously women, which is the case for a lot of girls.

Faeries Real Art, 7th grade. 

Honestly a pretty ambitious composition that I'm not surprised I didn't finish. Definitely inspired by James Gurney's Dinotopia imaginative realism and crowd scenes.

More faeries, some costume design practice and lettering! 8th grade.

Girl cursed with donkey ears and tail, 8th grade.

Some kind of Kingdom Hearts inspired character and monsters, 8th grade.

The fashion, though. The stripy arm sleeves. The heart headband. The layered chunky necklaces and big belt.

Self-portrait, 8th grade!

You guys know I love self-portraits! Elements of note:

• Straightened hair. Side bangs. V-neck with cami underneath.
• My interests apparently were: Violin, the color purple, dance/ballet, drawing, Kingdom Hearts, my bedazzled ipod nano, Pirates of the Caribbean. 
• 2000s elements: Bam! Rainclouds with face. -Tastic as a suffix. Hearts. Rainbows. 
• < ( ^-^ ) >

I read a smattering of comics in my yoouuuth, usually just borrowed from friends. Some manga here and there, some of my dad's 70s superhero comics, some Neopets comics, some webcomics on Deviantart, some American-kid comics like Captain Underpants and the beginning of the W.I.T.C.H. books. 

I kind of sideways osmosis absorbed comics culture without really diving in, which is probably why I started a million comics, drew a page or two and then stopped. Drew a lot of concepts and front covers and stopped.

A cover for a fan comic for the manga Prince of Tennis that my friend Erin and I made concepts for, 8th grade.

Clearly just a cooler version of ourselves, we named the characters Piper and Isla.

Oh boy some OCs Erin and I made up for a class and then wanted to really make, 8th grade.

STRAP IN for the cringe-iest thing I made in middle school.

An enemies-to-lovers stories about a secret demi-god son of Hades named Jordan Rivers, or "The Raven", and his girlfriend, secret demi-goddess daughter of Zeus named Liza, or "The Angel". 

(And of course now I know that would make them cousins but.... That's eighth grade art for you.)

The only page I ever drew for this comic and it's only half done. 8th grade.

FEDORA and SKINNY BLACK TIE. 8th grade.

CUT STRAIGHT TO MY HEART WITH THIS DRAWING that I MADE with these TWO HANDS. I'm so glad it still exists. 8th grade.

And now as my final treat I have for you the only comic I ever drew more than one page for: The Star Brigade! 

Please enjoy 5 pages of my groundbreaking 2007 intro to the Magical Girl comics genre. Materials include stapled computer paper, #2 pencil, and Crayola crayon.

Amazing. It's only been 14 years since I made these 5 pages, maybe soon you'll get to see what happens to Kylie in her new role as the Happiness Protector in the Star Brigade!

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Welcome back to 2021! The present is far from perfect, but at least it's not 2007. I'll take the responsibilities of being an adult over the anguish of being a tween any day.

Were you making art as a middle schooler? Or did you start making art as an adult and are glad about it after seeing this? What kind of art did you make as a tween? I highly recommend taking a look back at your own middle school art if you haven't in a while, and let us know in the comments what you think.

Bonus points: Any brave souls who share their middle school art to their Instagram stories or feed, tag me @ragonia_ and #ragoniapatreon and I'll share it to my stories!

 Let's shake up the need for Instagram perfection with some tweenage confidence.

Up next month in the Time Machine ep. 2... We'll visit The High School Era, where I spend a bunch of time doing artsy photo edits, doodle a lot, and do a terrible job in my AP Art class because I discover Tumblr and boys.

See you then!