Bittersweet Candy Bowl

A simple question. Many of you forrumites are artists. Most of you are quite good at it too! So I ponder… What got you started in art?

What inspired you to first start drawing? How did you learn to draw? What were your biggest influences? Did you take lessons? Self teach?

If you were self taught, how did you do it? If you had a teacher, who were they? How did they influence you?

I’ve always greatly admired artists. In a single image, you can convey an emotion, or trigger a response from the viewer, that I as a writer struggle to achieve in an entire 2000+ word story. It facinates me! I’ve always wished I could draw, but it’s just something I’ve never been able to grasp. So I thought, perhaps hearing the tales of your origins might help me figure out ways I might start to learn the mystical ways of the drawn image

I’ve been drawing forever, since I was little. I actually started drawing because of comics… I taught myself using books and just drawing whatever up until I moved to Arkansas, where my parents were still happy and hunky-dory and signed me up for art classes. I got into anime when I was living in Arkansas, and I believe that is one of the reasons that I suck. I kept trying to emulate anime and it was terrible. Anyways, I think my biggest influences came from movies, grafitti, and comic books. I still suck to this day, so I’m still practicing practicing practicing.

I’ve been drawing tidbits of stuff since… well, fourth grade? They weren’t much. It wasn’t until sixth grade that I actually stopped drawing stickmen. Nothing serious even then, because I followed the path of anime and (hur hur) some of the observational drawings elude me even now.

If you are trying to practice drawing, collect all your drawings in one place (or some easy to access place). And date your drawings. It is very encouraging to see your improvement from month to month if you’ve been drawing often (but very discouraging if you’re not).

I suggest you to first practice observational drawing. It’s the most accessible way, although the hardest to master. Anime will only get you so far, and even then, some manga artists still depend heavily on their other drawing skills. It’s nice to know how to draw them, if only to impress the common people, but it’s far from being the most impressive drawing you can do.

The earliest time I can remember drawing was somewhere between ages 3-5, but I’m not really sure what inspired me to do so. All the schools I went to had an art class everyday from Kindergarden all the way up through High School. However it wasn’t until High School that my skills actually improved to the point of creating some awesome pieces. The High School I went to was a Performing and Visual Arts school of which you had to chose a major to follow throughout the four years and I chose to be an Art Major. I can attribute most of what I learned to one teacher, who is one of the few people I’ve met that instills the desire for students to keep in contact or visit when they are in town. He was just a great guy who could keep a person wanting to pay attention in class to actually learn the material. Freshman year when we did still lives and perspective drawings he would tear your work in half, chuck it and make you start over if it was wrong. It was rough at the time, but the other students and myself feel that we wouldn’t have improved as greatly as we have had he not done so. Now days, I have admittingly slacked off, and will only draw things that greatly inspire me or if my friends decide to have a design session.

@Sean

That sure is some tough love right there. If somebody tore my pieces apart, somebody’s bound to be in a world of hurt.

But wow, wouldn’t that instill a fear of deviating from the norm? I admit life and perspective drawings to be very important, but, wow. Tearing your work apart? Wow.

That’s just tough.

You would think so, but the 70 plus of us who went through said procedure turned out a lot better than the groups who didn’t receive such treatment after he retired. He promoted and helped our abstract and creative ideas as well. It seems easier to manipulate or drastically change an image or idea when you know how it is supposed to look in the first place, almost like a shock factor, but with more positive feedback.

I also believe that his personality and general humorous methods helped us get over the initial shock of having our pieces that we spent hours or days on destroyed.

I’ve been drawing ever since I could hold something in my hand and scribble it on anything, anywhere haha. My dad is an artist so I got tons of encouragement from him (not forcing, though) once he saw that I had I guess ‘more than average’ talent for my age to draw and paint, pottery, etcetc. Each year I’d have an art class but never did any art classes outside of school. Around 9 I hit my anime/manga stage, which a large part of me regrets incredibly because I KNOW it has held me back from what I could be now. When I hit middle school I just stuck with it, signed up for art classes instead of being just assigned them, and improved more and more. I took Art 1 and 2 in sophomore and junior year and IB Art 1 and 2 in senior. Art 1 and 2 is when I realized ‘hey, I can do a lot more than this anime shit’ so by end of Art 1 I was out of the anime/manga scene and was pushing it out of my drawings. By end of IB Art I’d experienced tons of different medias and realized this is what I wanted to do with my life and knew I was damn good at it. Now in college, I had started out being Bio Major with Pre-med, but I’m soon switching to Art Major. I plan on doing medical illustration as a career with free lance on side .

My dad is a HUGEHUGEHUGE, number one art influence in my life and helps me constantly. We have great discussions about it whether it be another artist’s work, his work or mine.

Biggest struggle is still trying totally remove anime out of any possible ‘style’. I hate it so badly. Where I did it for a good 6-7ish years it’s still obviously in my art sometimes and bugs the hell out of me.

Well… pre-BCB, my drawings used to suck. Badly. I had pretty much given up on it.

Then I met BCB, a webcomic that pretty much fascinated me. After reading the entire comic in one sitting, I decided to lurk the forums, and after a while, I started shyly posting here and there.

Then I saw that most people had been drawing fanarts and stuff. Still being new to BCB and completely excited about it, I decided to make some fanart of my own. Even if I didn’t know how to draw, I decided to try my best, and using Taeshi’s 2006 design sheet as a base, I drew this. It took me about 5 or 6 hours to get it how I wanted. Yeah I tend to get obsessed like that sometimes.

Needless to say… Taeshi was my biggest influence in drawing, followed by Paul Robertson, and lastly, this forum’s users.

After that drawing, I pretty much started to experiment and do things by myself, trying not to use any models. I still sucked, but try after try after try, I eventually was satisfied with each of the drawings, and was able to spend much less time making them. I gained experience and now, while I can’t say my drawings are the greatest, I think I can say that I can draw now.

i dont make images…. but i code… and thats an art… right?
and failing that, the art of the headshot. im a master of it.

When I was 6, my parents decided to enhance my creative side and have me take up piano, I’m now 16 and still learning. When I was 10, I started reading Manga, and decided that the characters were “doing it wrong” as it were, this was probably due to the fact that I was more tested to lateral thinking rather than literal, creative was my thing, so I began to draw.
At 11, I made my first chapter of Manga. It wasn’t very good, but I was happy with it.
Now, I still draw, but I’m less inclined to draw chapters of stories, and would rather draw single scenes, with one or two characters.
I have an extremely strong creative taint, as commented on by many people, and that’s mostly why I draw, because I can’t put my ideas into many other formats. I also write stories and fanfiction.
That’s how I got started in art =^_^=

I was very upset and I felt very empty for a long time in high school. I needed a way to vent it all. I became stalwartly dedicated to my craft for two years until I ran out of confidence… and now it’s back again!

As much as i hate to say it, but it was anime.
I just loved the style when I was young, so I tryed to replicate it. It took many years to get to the piece of shit art I have.

Math class…

In terms of style, I’m self taught even though I’ve taken art classes most of my life. I don’t remember the exact age I started drawing, but I think I was around 4. I originally started because of tv and videogames, mostly fan work and stuff I guess. Around third grade, I got a How-to-Draw-Manga book (I didn’t actually read manga or watch anime until recently). None of my work done in any of the manga styles were any good, but it did put me in the right direction. Somewhere during eighth grade and the freshman year of high school, I started this weird style. It wasn’t quite manga or cartoonism. It was very blocky and simple, but I was able to do poses and figures a lot better. I did another style change around the beginning of junior year where I made a push to cartoonism, mainly stuff seen in comic books (I don’t really read these either). Again, it wasn’t perfect as it still retained qualities of manga so it was in a sort of gray area. I’ve gotten much better recently, having looked at different artists and art books. I’m currently in college for Digital Design and I’m aiming to get into video games.

In terms of inspiration, at first it was mainly television. Over the years, video games and webcomics have taken over what has inspired me. My friends, also artists, have pushed me to do better, but mostly because they each had one facet that I thought they were much better than me in and I tried learning from them.

I started drawing alot few days ago, everything inspired by hentai

Ive drawn spontaneously threw out my school years. Even during my third year in high school when i got interested in drawing I didn’t do much. Funny sine right after i dropped out I drew like crazy. xD

I think that was about/over four years ago :o

been drawing since i can remember, just i wasnt very god at it. at 14 i found out why (a physical deformation in my right arm) and resolved to practice a bit. I first starting with hacking images then made my own (which, after hacking, was surprisingly easy)

despite expecting a lot of negative comments, generally people are impressed and i won second place in an art contest on youtube. which i didnt expect at all.

in fact the only person to ever give me a nagative comment with any piece of my artwork was Taeshi. Nuff said

It’s pretty amazing to me how many different origins there are amongst the community here, and yet how many of you curse having gone through an Anime phase haha. Though I must admit that I’ve been avoiding learning to use Anime as an influence because I already kinda hate those western people who sit around and just draw Manga all day and claim it to be awesome when really they’re just ripping off the styles of famous Manga artists rather than developing their own.

@Chazfullmetal
I do question if perhaps the reason Taeshi’s the only one to give negative feedback is because you’re young and everyone else is mollycoddling you?

Just a thought.

^ thanks. thanks for the confidence booster

and unfortunately i cant say this without coming across as defensive:

i got good feedback from some of the better artists on youtube: who were all surprised that i frequently criticised my own artwork.

^ gains respect from Taeshi’s similar childhod to my current one:

actual reaction remains unchanged. silent hatred.

i didn’t.

the end.

wow hearing all these life storys make me want to be better in art good thing im only 12 now i know how to shape ideas and concepts I never even knew about life

Depends what you consider “art,” Maverik. I neither write nor draw frequently, but you consider perversion a medium I am a past master.

I think it all started when I read HP Lovecraft for the first time. I saw the effects of unnameable horrors but he left so much to the imagination. I try to think of things so horrible that no one has ever thought of them before so I can maybe become a horror writer someday by combining my knack for disgusting shit with my sense of humor.

I’m currently imagining a choir of deformed fetuses in formaldehyde jars singing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

i started doing poetry to convey, express and ‘play with’ my thoughts and opinions, which, at my most depressive stage, was always oriented as needlesly dark and tragic

It all started when i first had to do shakespeare at school then in high school i also did edgar allen poe, both of these being my inspriration, i didnt have much to do in my spare time so i wrote poetry.

at first it was crappy moody poetry about feelings n shit, but later, when i was fifteen, i realised how fucked up the world and i are, so i just wrote about that.
And there we go.