The other day I thought that I had discovered a way to finally view my old digital art that has been deleted, but sadly it was just another dead end. I think that this was my last hope, and my art is officially gone forever. Although I wasn’t able to see any of my actual art, I was able to see some things.
I recently made a few changes to my YouTube channel, and I wanted to document the changes, but I didn’t have any images of what it looked like before I changed it. I found a website called WayBack that lets you view older versions of webpages. I looked up the URL of my YouTube channel, and I ended up getting a version of the webpage wayyyy older than I was looking for:
I can’t believe that YouTube used to look like this. I that people think that really bad webpage designs died out with Myspace in like 2008, but here is proof that you could have a bright purple background with lime green text on YouTube in 2012. You also could list your very edgy™ interests and music taste. What a time to be alive.
Also, I completely forgot that I made weird animations about…. derps? I wish that the “King of derp” video had a visible thumbnail. I don’t even know what that means. That’s the main problem with WayBack. I thought I was going to finally be able to see some of my old art, but all I got was blank thumbnails.
A few times before this I’ve mentioned how my former favorite website Sketchfu is dead. Well, using WayBack I was able to view its corpse, and I would like to share the ghost of my profile with you. Let’s start at the very beginning. Here is a version of my profile that was saved from January 11th, 2010:
You can read the entirety of that bio, but I’m tired of talking about how weird I used to be on the internet when I was like ten, so I’m just going to skip over it. I just want to point out that at this point I already had 442 drawings. 442 drawings that are gone forever! It gets worse though:
By November 26th, 2010, I had over 600 drawings. If I remember correctly, Sketchfu didn’t let you permanently delete drawings. So when I said in my bio that I have 160 deleted drawings, that probably means that they were still added into my drawing total even though they were not visible. But still, that’s about 450 drawings that are gone. Look to the right. That is where my drawings should be, but all that is left are white boxes. I’m especially mad about the drawings that are circled because those are drawings of my original characters, and I remember them being some of my best drawings at the time, so I want to actually see them so I can see if they were actually good or not.
Here is what my profile looked like in 2013 right before it was killed:
723 drawings gone forever. To the right, you can see that I had a self-portrait. I have no idea what it looks like. Did it actually look like me? Who knows? No one, because they deleted it. Also, this website didn’t have ads or anything so it never was making money, so I don’t understand why they couldn’t have left the webpages up.
When I was a kid, the internet was still a bit of a new idea. The idea of drawing and sharing your art online was exciting, so that is primarily the type of art that I made. The fact that all of this art is now gone forever is always going to be upsetting for me, because I feel like most other artists are able to look back into a notebook and see their drawings from when they were a kid. I can’t do that. I put all my trust into a new technology, and it ended up falling out of popularity for newer and more advanced ways to spend your time online. You know that old saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? For me it should have been “don’t put all your childhood drawings on one website that will inevitably become outdated and get deleted”.
You can view every old version of my profile here