December meme: December 22

[badbastion]

December 22: cassiopeia7: how did you get into arting?

Oh goodness, this is a hard question. Let's see. I liked drawing as a kid but wasn't very good at it... lots of hands behind backs and cutting people off at the knee so I wouldn't have to draw feet, and I'd draw dinosaurs and crappy spaceships and vroom vroom cars, lol. I wasn't great, maybe even wasn't good, but I liked it. I was more interested in reading and math and playing outside.

I stopped drawing some time in elementary school, then decided to take Art in high school. I found out that I was pretty good at it, so I stuck with it through all four years. Then I took a Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain class during my brief stint in college, and I loved it.

Then I quit again! I let ten years go by before I picked up a pencil again, and by that point I was all kinds of out of practice. Also, I'd been reading a lot of manga, having just found the medium. I'd also just found out about fandom, and I read about people using tablets, and i wanted one. I got one for Christmas. It's the same one I'm still using now, seven years later. I was all into anime/manga at first, which was okay, because it got me drawing. I have mixed feelings about it now. I think it held me back as an artist when I could have been spending those years learning my own style, but then again, it taught me how to stylize, and eventually I did find my own style. It's still a work in progress, though. I do still admire Kubo Tite and Junji Ito's styles, but I wish I could draw/paint with more realism. I never really painted, and I wish I had. But that's how I got into arting, each time, lol.