I always tell people that I’ve been drawing ever since I was three years old. That isn’t a lie, but I think it paints the wrong impression. Yeah, I was drawing, but I was still using circles for heads until about middle school. I drew sparingly, and the things I drew were often highly specific and mostly animals—lots and lots of animals. Primarily horses, birds, dogs and cats. . . the odd Pokemon or two, although I did draw a myriad of made-up creatures, such as my beloved Cottonball the “reptile dog.” But I digress.

I can track a number of major shifts in my art. The first major shift, which took me longer than I would have liked, was when I finally decided to try my hand at actually maybe drawing heads for once and not just circles. It was awkward. I kept making the cheeks too puffy, or the chins weirdly lumpy, and I couldn’t pinpoint why I wasn’t satisfied with the look.

That’s the thing about art: it will always look really weird at first, which is why you have to keep going. Awkward is simply part of the creative process, even for experienced artists; you just gotta keep pushing through it.

The next major shift in my art came in my early high school years with the anime-inspired “chibi” art that was really popular at the time. But I didn’t want to completely emulate anime style art; I got it in my head that anime art was “unrealistic” or “anatomically incorrect” and therefore not valuable for honing one’s artistic skills (a needlessly derisive sentiment in retrospect). I also had a strong aversion to just copying other styles, so I did back flips just to avoid creating something that could be possibly linked to any existing style. I needed my art to be completely my own.

But therein lies the problem: if you avoid taking inspiration from other art styles, your own style potentially suffers because you aren’t learning from other artists. You aren’t feeding your muse. It’s like a writer who never reads books (I mean, I also kind of did that too, but not on purpose). Naturally, my art progressed slowly.

A friend of mine once compared my art style to a mosaic, and I was inclined to agree. My art was a bit clunky, disjointed, my pencil pressure hard and my lines stiff. But I created things that I can still appreciate to this day.

A colored pencil drawing of three original characters from three separate fanfictions. Their names were Aurora, Shiroko, and Dahlia. June 2010

The next shift definitely came with my introduction to digital art. I received my first Kanvas digital tablet for my (I think 15th?) half-birthday. My brother then helped me acquire Photoshop by Definitely Very Legal Means so that I had an art program to work in. The possibilities were many, but the learning curve was steep.

Over time, I got a handle of digital art, but I still teetered between that and traditional art. Habit and limited tech knowledge made me take on a hybrid process of hand-drawing the under sketch on paper, then finishing the piece digitally. I wasn’t Googling tips and tricks for using the software; I was too scared to Google anything, fearing that I’d come across confusing, irrelevant, or graphic material. So I’d just sit and stew in my little comfort zone hoping it was enough but knowing it wasn’t.

My two styles: “chibi” and semi-realistic, June 2010

Some hand-sketched underdrawings of the below artworks

My process usually involved hand-drawing the undersketches on paper first, then scanning those to be inked and colored digitally. Dates range 2010-2012

Four years post-high school (2011-2015) were the hardest years of my life. I’d prefer not to dwell on the “why,” but simply speaking: my art fell to the wayside. I’d put out the odd comic or two when the motivation struck me—which it sometimes did. I was too focused on trying to survive to put any effort into my creative outlets. Telling people that “I am an artist” elicited a sharp pain in my gut because I believed it to be false. I was an artist. Or I would have been an artist if I ever had time for it.

This one’s great, actually, and you cannot convince me otherwise. July 2013

I realize as I write this that there was a major shift in its own here: a shift to only making art for other people. I’d make things out of guilt or obligation, or out of frustration. My comics often centered around work-related stress or attempted to pander to others, and I rarely had the energy to digitize my work.

In short: my personal life killed every bit of my creative passion.

Look at me, making anti-work comics “before” it was cool. March 2015

My boss did get a kick out of this one (and his eyebrows were very thick). April 2015

I wouldn’t call this next one a “shift” so much as a “desperate need for change.” I wrote, yes. I wrote for classes, mainly, but I wrote for myself, and it was manic. Derivative. Dissociative. I wrote odd, uncanny versions of my reality hoping to somehow find an escape. I still have those stories stored on an old flash drive, damned if they ever see the light of day. My creative passion warped into something deeply unfamiliar.

Gratefully, the story doesn’t end there.

To be continued in Part 2. . .