What started you in art?

[Digital]

So what got you interested in art? How did it all begin?

How long have you worked at refining your ability, what is probably the one or two moments where you felt frustrated during your time learning to refine your skills, then had that aha moment. Did you have that "Aha" moment?

[Hare]

Not sure when it started, been drawing a lot since I was a little kid, but I definitely got started in the digital art direction upon taking a Photoshop class in highschool. And then when I discovered a pet site forum many years ago, I dedicated myself to being able to draw for browser games. I fell in love with the cellshaded style like tgose found on Neopets and Subeta. It really captured my eye. I fell in love with vectors, too. There's a certain cellshaded style that just captures me completely. 

Most frustrating time was probably early on before I could produce anything remotely like I wanted. There were no aha moments. It took about 5-10 years of practice to be able to draw things the way I wanted them. Before then my art was just one disappointment after another. I still have those disappoints here and there, but other pieces that I'm really proud of that make it all worthwhile. 

[SingSong]

I think the first reason I wanted to be able to draw better was to be able to show people want I visualized in my head. For example, I remember having a dream about someone hanged in a barn and the whole farm set on fire. (Yes, a pretty dark dream for a teenager at the time.) But the colors were so vivid. I thought, I wish I could paint that.

 

But I only got into drawing when I began playing Neopets. So many people there were artists, and that encouraged me to try. I wanted to win the Beauty Contest and put nice art on my pets' profiles. I only drew a few things (and completed them) until I was about twenty though. I never understood how to shade. Then a boyfriend at the time told me "shading is used to show depth", and I guess that was my "aha moment", because that helped in some way.

 

I don't practice enough and have only done so many completed images in the past five years (I'm 25 now), but the way I learned to draw better was by studying other art and mentally taking notes. I looked at pixel art pieces and tried to imitate them, and I looked at the PSDs of artists and observed what techniques they used. Now I can look at digital art and generally know what an artist did to accomplish a specific look. That helps me when doing my own things.

 

But I struggle A LOT to get things to look the way I want. Anatomy, perspective, and shading tend to still be issues for me. I know lack of practice is part of what makes those things harder for me. But I also look at old pieces of mine and am happy with how far I've come.

[chutkat]

I think it was before Kinder garden when I started with art. My cousin used to draw unicorns for me and she got tired of me asking for more unicorns each time and told me to draw my own. Ever since then I've been drawing mostly horses.

I touched my first digital program and fancy art materials until I was in college, before that I always painted with whatever colours my parents could get for me.  So naturally I've been practising digital art alongside traditional art since then.

I haven't had that "aha" moment. I do study really hard about concept art, colour, moods, anatomy etc, but It's still a challenge. It has gotten easier with time though!

Thank you for making this post, it's always very interesting to read everyone's stories! I'm sorry that I'm really bad at talking about myself~

[Aminirus]

I've been doing art for as long as I remembered. When I was kid, I had lots of those books where you trace and color the image and I had a lot of stenciles and wrote a lot of stories... mind you, stories from a 6 year old are not all that fantastic. Before the age of 6, as far as I remember, they didn't really support the arts in any way, so I didn't really get to do it, so when I was finally put into a family, they gave me stuff to draw and lots of paper and what not, so think it just took off from there. 

I struggled a lot in high school because they pressure you to not see art as a career so I went into pre-veterinary program, but after flunking chemistry because I don't test well with problem solving questions, I went back to art and found a different college. So I went into animation, struggled with it but found it very interesting, tried some 3D and struggled so badly with it that I broke down in one my classes because I just could not do it for the life of me and was just frustrating my teacher... so after that I tried game and character design, love it and finished college under the game design category. 

College was probably my 'aha' moment because the artwork I produced there skyrocketed in style and concept compared to the work I produced before college. The difference is almost scary (at least to me) and I also got to write and create stories. I loved creating stories. It was my most favorite class where we had to create a story for a game, develop the environments, characters, and overall visual look and feel of the game. Loved it to death and thus its now mostly what I do. Though I also do graphic novels alongside game design :3

[tiff]

I'm just a hobbyist artist, but I started seriously trying to get better at art when I was 11 and discovered Oekakis for the first time! I remember those were a lot of fun back in the day, so I am a little sad that they're pretty much all dead these days. And nowadays, Java applets are not being supported anymore by browsers either, so it's a pain to even try to use them at all.

I remember I'd spend a lot of time looking at the art tutorials on Suta-Raito and Mew's Hangout if anyone here remembers those sites haha! I learned about Oekakis from Suta-Raito. And I remember when I first drew on various Oekakis (I think Oekaki Central was actually my first), people gave me tips on how to improve my art, so I was able to get better. It's funny and super cool how small bits of content that random creators put on the Internet can end up influencing people's lives. 

[jakdacrowe]

Mmm... My mom.
But I won't go into detail for that.

 

Aside from that, it was getting inspired by jennadelle that got me stuck in art.
Dragons and other cool concepts were thrown at me, so I couldn't leave. Made my own stories. Made my own characters.

So I spent my days in class, drawing on the margins in my textbooks.
Eventually I switched from becoming a vet to doing art.

[LIZ]

i  have been drawing for well along time. i have worked with water colors mostly, and promo caly. then i got into neopets and thought it would be fun to draw stuff . so i found rescreatu on 4-1-2007 and was like i want to work for them. so basically the artists there taught me how to draw on the computer, i started with a mouse! i did free art work for them, then got into some payed art work and have been drawing from then.  i have drawn for rescreatu, egg cave, verpets, goatlings, the hollows,pet nebula and a lot of commissions.  i love to draw monsters,wood stuffs, meat, crystals and weapons and plants.