I Drew A Big Circle

Art journeys, are they a straight line? Do they zig-zag? How do you know which way to go? Everyone’s is different, so here’s mine so far; Like most people who draw, I’ve been drawing, doodling, and sketching since I was pretty young.

Early Influences

In the 90s I was influenced by cartoons like G1 Transformers which I though were great but then there was real Japanese anime. At the time, the Sci-Fi channel (now Syfy) used to show some anime pretty early in the morning, so while anime wasn’t mainstream quite yet I used to watch The New Adventures of Gigantor (Tetsujin 28) and Robotech (Macross) back-to-back every morning. I know that I started drawing distinct characters in 4th Grade and by 7th Grade I learned basic anatomy when my friend’s Dad gifted me his old copy of “How to Draw Comics The Marvel Way“ (Thanks Kirk!).

In my family, art was seen as just a hobby but not necessarily something that I could make into a career and mind you I come from a family of immigrants so, lucrative career was the only goal I was supposed to have in mind. My secondary interest in computers was seen as much more likely to be lucrative. My parents were not wrong but they also didn’t realize that I was too afraid to express that my interest in computers was solely to make art.

A trip abroad in 1993 would change things for me. My cousin lived abroad and I looked up to him as he was not only an extremely skilled artist at a young age (mind you he was maybe a year younger than me). I remember he was drawing realistic anatomy from muscle magazines and drawing Dragonball Z characters which I had never seen before (and wouldn’t see again until 1997 in the States) that looked like Akira Toriyama drew them already; his skills were fostered and he was set to attend art school with the full support of my aunt and uncle. I think that was what I secretly wanted too.

In 4th or 5th grade I stayed with my cousins in NY for a weekend and I saw the gratuitously violent Ninja Scroll anime. I was far too young to really process all of it but it really blew my mind and really got me excited about art.

1997 was also when Pokémon came to the States and that game and its art would live rent-free in my brain. I also started reading the odd Tokyo Pop manga and watching anime on VHS. So I drew a bunch but had no real direction but how many kids do at that age?

I don’t blame my parents for their outlook. I thank my dad for taking me to an AutoCAD summer camp way back in 1997. AutoCAD and 3D was way over my head but I did get to see that there were computer programs to make art outside of MSpaint on the family computer. So while I received encouragement to draw for fun, I was also dissuaded from making it into anything more.

School Days

With no art school on the horizon, I drew to keep myself entertained, to insulate myself from bullies or negative attention, and as a conversation starter with people throughout my school days. As a kid, I seemed to have a weird rule around not drawing existing characters because I wanted to make my own original characters and still to this day I really can only remember drawing maybe five existing characters in total but I definitely copied the stylistic choices of artists from manga, game art, and anime. I took any art related electives to get more instruction on my favorite thing to do. I distinctly remember being in both a computer graphics class and a computer programming class in highschool. I loved the computer graphics class as it was my first exposure to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator but I hated the programming class. Most people in the programming class had already coded games on their TI-83 calculators for fun and I was one of the few students without any coding experience at all, something I was ridiculed for. Little would I know that would set the theme of doubt for the rest of my education…and career.

So I kept up my drawing throughout college, not truly taking it seriously outside of pursuing a minor in graphic design. As a college student, I finally had my own PC and one of the first things I bought was a student discounted copy of the Education Version of Adobe Illustrator 10 for Windows. Adobe software was very expensive back then nearly $1,000 for the regular version, so it was cost prohibitive for something my family saw as a hobby and I think the version I owned was about $300 after discount, essentially the price of Sony’s Playstation 2 gaming console. I asked for a Wacom Intuous 3 for the Christmas of 2003 and I thought I was on my way. Oh I was wrong as there were no useful tutorials outside of a hefty textbook. Online tutorials were scant if they existed at all, and there was nothing in the way of video instruction online at the time just Ebaum’s World to make you laugh, so I naturally hit a wall trying to learn Illustrator in a vacuum.

Back in the early 2000s at my university, graphic design was not a major but it was one of maybe three ways to get exposure and instruction making art with computers. The other ways were a computer graphics class which was math heavy and focused on 3D graphics which again I was dissuaded from taking by other students who excelled in computer science and there was a mechanical engineering track which I was not even close to being able to get on. So I signed up for the graphic design minor which helped me cope with the stressors of my computer science major and all the students and professors who doubted me.

TRY CATCH FAIL: TRY AGAIN

After college, I somehow reasoned I was “too busy“ to keep up my drawing practice. I did a couple of graphic design projects for a family friend directly after graduation but then found myself in the software industry slogging away as a tester. So I quietly killed my art dream and prided myself in making the more pragmatic but also wrong choice for myself. I let my other hobbies take over, other interests formed and I guess I wasn’t going to look back, as it hurt too much.

Fast forward 12 years and two other “pragmatic“ choices later and the pandemic started, I was suddenly flush with time without a daily commute so I picked up art again to enrich the isolated time I now had but I felt so behind.

The online resources are so different in the 2020s, it was like looking at a part of the internet I didn’t know existed. I started off studying anatomy all over again, I explored traditional and digital mediums I had been too intimidated to try like watercolors and acrylics, I could use most of the Adobe products for a monthly fee and I learned how to use the latest versions of them all via online courses. I was able to do things in days what would have taken me weeks to learn in the past, and it was really liberating.

Did I do a 360? Or a 180?

I returned back at the threshold I started at, almost back to that 18 year old version of myself with everything wide open to explore and I wasn’t scared this time around. It has been 3 years since my art reboot, I’m doing things I knew I could do but didn’t have the resources to achieve and doing somethings I didn’t think I could do too. Lots of things have changed but my drive to learn and grow is just the same as ever and now I have the support and backing of my loved ones and a lot more confidence to see where my art journey will take me. I guess in my art journey I drew a big circle perhaps a wobbly one (Then I drew it again in Illustrator so it looks perfect).

My very first version of Illustrator