You ever think about how a single action or comment can change the entire tragectory of your life? I remember the key moment I felt strongly compelled to learn to draw cute anime girls. I can't place it to a year but it was likely around 2004 because that's when the manga ARIA was published. I thought the characters were so cute and wanted to draw characters like it. I already liked writing a lot; both written stories and little stick comics, but I wanted to learn to actually draw for real. I asked my grandparents for some paper and with nothing but a wooden pencil and some line paper I went to work.
I'm a bit shocked I still have that drawing to this day because I remember being quite upset at it. The head was all wrong. Hair just didn't make sense. The skirt looked like a wreath of french fries around the waste. I was going through the motions of copying what I saw but I didn't really understand it. I showed it to my grandparents and in a straightforward and brutally honest way typical of them they said it was "weird" and "alien-like". It's funny to me now, knowing they have all the tact and emotional awareness of my stupid orange cat Spot at 2am when he's only slightly hungry, but at the time it kind of crushed me and really made me think it's just something I wouldn't be able to do.
I've drawn off and on since then. Really, I'd love to find some of the things I've drawn tucked away in one of my many unorganized, unopacked boxes kept as they have been for three different moves and if I do some day I'm sure I'll share but I'd say that was a big point in which I just decided I wouldn't invest too much of my time into drawing. Fast-forward to the last year and the desire has been rekindled. I'm not getting any younger, I'm surrounded by amazing and talented friends who make spawning in the most compelling and captivating illustrations look like sorcery, and I truly believe anyone with enough practice can be intermidate at anything. And really, I just want to create things that make me happy.
I've been drawing my own thumbnails for Youtube every stream for a while now and while it's been a fun exercise I've had a friend recently start an art journey doing only traditional. The friend whom we'll call Lan has been taking the journey pretty seriously and has been filling out a page in a sketchbook everyday, looking up resources and actively trying to learn in a way that is inspiring. I've even gotten some awesome fanart from his journey!
One of my best friends and an artist I look up to, Yokura, has also taken up doing art now and again via pencil and paper after being mostly digital only for years. She's rambled about how it's made her feel like she's relearning how to learn and how most of the time she's going through the motions of drawing things familiar to her. That there's something about not being able to Control + Z, not be able to pen stablize and just sit there and put pen to paper that makes her feel like she needs to think critically and it makes her feel challenged again as an artist. This has compelled me to buy a little notebook and start my own art journey and finally become the frill and ribbon painting, cute round head shaping artist I've always wanted to be.
I think overall this turned out well but I can tell I'm not used to drawing physically. I felt shakey drawing lines, I erased more than I'd have liked (though suprisingly less than I expected), and I'm absolutely terrified of even the thought of inking my drawing with a pen. After drawing my first line I felt the strangest phantom sensation of nearly reaching out and pressing Control + Z in the air. I've always had an issue making these ugly tall oval heads. It's one of my least favorite habits when drawing. While I think I have pretty good ideas for drawing, I have a hard time turning that imagination into a tangable thing that makes sense. I decided to reference the first thing I saw that I thought had a really nice head shape so I turned a Honkai Star Rail Herta figure nearby to an angle I thought looked appealing and tried replicating that pose.
Don't worry, I promise I dusted off this bookcase the moment I looked at this photo and realized how bad it's gotten.
Art is hard! But nothing hard is earned over night. There's something about becoming an adult that saps away your whimsy, and I really want to reclaim this piece of me that I feel I've lost. When my attention economy is trying to be bought and sold by algyothms genetically modified to be as addicting as possible, it's easy to see years of your life slip away as you go "what am I doing?" Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be a kid again. I just want to reclaim my desire and ability to create and make time for it. I want to make a underground newspaper distributed to my friends with the latest bad memes and joke news pieces making jabs at those close to me. I want to write shitty harem isekai thinking I'm making the coolest story before I even knew what the word harem or isekai even meant. I want to turn my forum romance RP into a visual novel. These are definitely not immediate "cringey" things off the dome that I used to do and I really don't want to do exactly those things, but I'm sure you get what I mean.
I just think it would be awesome to be an intermidate artist so I'm going to do what I can to work towards that.