Comic Fury Webcomic Hosting - When did you start to seriously draw?

Not to be confused with "Who do you take the most influence from in your comic".
Where and when did you first pick up a pen/pencil/crayon/drawing thing and started consistently making things?

I was an odd child and found myself suddenly interested in political cartoons at the ripe old age of 15. I got pretty into it for a while, but they never went out of my drawing pad and honestly where quite horrid in their lack of deeper meaning. After that I kept the same character style, only instead of spewing uninformed angsty teenager political views, they where getting into often fatal situations (very Happy Wheels style madness) on skate boards, in cross roads, or where just random hicks and Indians that represented my friends and I.

Then I stopped for a while (they still made it on some assignments and books, but not really anywhere else), went to college for a bit and pretended to be a scientist and musician, and stopped drawing for a time.
To finish out the story, I had always loved the "Men In Hats" webcomic, along with a few other standards (XKCD, PFSC) and the idea of doing one myself had kind of always been at the back of my brain somewheres. The second summer of my college career saw all but 4 or so of my close friends leaving town, and naturally the only ones I would hang out with where the super weird ones. I began writing down the ridiculous things I heard, started drawing them in one of my old drawing pads and one day, bought a wacom tablet and started drawing digitally. And here I am.

Now, for YOUR stories!

Hmmm. I would say I started dabbling very young. I got interested in comic books at about 8, started tracing Spider Man out of a comic book about then. I wouldn't say it was serious, but I knew I wanted to draw. In about the 4th grade my friend and I talked about making a animated cartoon. It never really happened, but we also wanted to make a robot out of a cardboard box and bits of stuff we found around the house. Didn't get far with that either.

I started a comic strip for myself in the 6th grade I called "Little Lost Island" which I think sparked from watching too many Gilligan's Island reruns.

When Star Wars (it wasn't called episode IV back then) came out in theaters, I was drawing random images on everything. By the time I got into high school I started playing and running AD&D, and everything I was drawing was related to the adventures I was writing or the characters I was playing.

I started drawing a single panel gag cartoon called 'In the Dungeon' (which I still have some of, I should put them up as extras for the comic) a few years later and had a ton of fun with those.

Then I sort of left it all behind as life after high school hit. I started writing more serious about 13 years ago. Mostly short stories evolving around the games I was playing. I was taking my writing serious. I started reading a webcomic called The Noob by Gianna around 2004. It got me thinking about doing a webcomic of my own. Then about three years ago I picked up the pencil again and got focused on making a webcomic.

This month I actually started posting the one story Ive been working on. I'm pretty serious about it now. My art has a ways to go, but after 35 years of puttering around, I'm finally doing what Ive always wanted.

I was drawing comics since I was about 9 or so, when I discovered Akira and Sin City in a local library, and was absolutely blown away by the art and the level of detail. During that time there was a manga boom and naturally I got into that as well. I was copying a lot of manga stuff, and went with that for a surprisingly long time.

However, I wasn't really serious about drawing. It always had been something to do on the side and for fun. I drifted in and out of fandoms and art styles.

It wasn't until I started No Songs that I got *serious* about art and honing myself. Having something that forces you to draw something consistently and all the time at a steady rate is an effective method to help improving, it keeps you on your toes, instead of just doing a single piece every now and then, which makes it easy to fall into a style. For me, at least.

About 4 years ago. I just doodled prior to that, but then the time came where I had to seriously think about my career choice, and a medical career was looking more and more unlikely. I took my first serious figure drawing class to see how well I'd fit, and I was hooked ever since.

I drew a lot as a kid, but I don't consider the crap I did then anything serious.

I have always seriously wanted to draw. I can't remember a time when I didn't.

I did the odd comic now and then, but the first time I seriously thought about doing comics was in middle school. My sister and I wrote letters to each other, pretending they were letters from our characters. I got impatient with the blocks of text and used pictures to fill in a lot of the action. Eventually, my sis said

"hey so. Why not just draw a comic?"

And then I drew over fifty comic pages of the war between dragons and giant bugs.

I drew comics with these three really cartoony characters called Ted, Red, and Fred, through 5th to 12th grade. Just little doodle comics on the borders of my papers. But that wasn't really serious. I also drew a lot using those step by step books that showed you how to draw things like Disney characters and I watched our local drawing show It's Curtoon Time religiously. But all of that was mostly copying things or drawing super cartoony things.

I did a lot of drawing in college from '02 to '06 in my spare time, but then kind of forgot about it when I got a job.

So, I guess I didn't really start drawing seriously until this January when I started this comic because I drew on and off before that, but never worked on a project consistently or really put in a lot of effort to get better.

So I guess it is sort of a combination of always and 6 months ago.

When I was 13. The year was 1971...

As everyone, I've been drawing all of my life. I had simple little, 4 panel comic way back in elementary school and never stopped. I created ParaFrenic back in '87 and got hired and published in '92. But to be honest, it really became clear when I join CF last year and started drawing with serious intent. I knew that the rest of the world could see it as opposed to my parents, aunts and uncles and the other 14 people who supported my self publishing career. Doing a webcomic on CF kicked it all into high gear.

Seriously seriously? summer 2010 actually. i was seeing a webcomic that's being hosted here and then i said "i wanna draw like that". then i got a notebook and began teaching myself from the internet and stuff.

it has been the best choice i have made.

Well, I've been drawing most of my life.

Mainly, just sketches.

And mainly, stick figures, except for when making things like weapons. I always had a knack for making detailed weapons. (In school, I got in a lot of trouble for making a gun out of legos, which looked close enough like a real gun that I almost got suspended.) But not really anything else.

It's still that way to this day, but it's been said that with my relatively-simplistic style and my humor that I'd make a good political cartoonist. (You should see the comic I made on The Pig War. :P)

I can understand where that sentiment comes from, but I don't really share that kind of passion. That comment DID get me more seriously into art, though. But not really. I did it more frequently after that comment, but just as casually.

But things really began to take off in the '06-'07 range. Somewhere around there, I began Comic Battle. Actually, I started its prototype a little before then, and it was around this time that I actually put it into comic form.

And once I got started...things just took off.

Soon, I was making all kinds of art. Digitally, I was making weapons, banners, avatars, and the like. I was beginning to sketch weapons a lot more than I originally did, getting better and better at drawing them, putting more and more detail into them, and shrinking them down so that they'd actually fit on my paper. :P

But more than that, it's around this time that I began to draw people. I gathered up my drawing books and read through them, getting their guidelines and trying to replicate their art, which quite a bit of success, and then "replicate with some modifications", with a decent amount of success. And that's still happening to this day.

(Dang, I wish I had a good scanner. I am a FAR better hand-artist than I am a digital-artist. I've been saying that for months, yet it's something which I have to quite consistently just say, "...just...take my word for it, okay?", 'cause I don't really have any proof of it other than what few sketches I DO have uploaded, mostly the weapons with a couple of Aragorn sketches as well.)

So I think the answer to the question is that I seriously started drawing when I began to make comics, with actual intent to make comics. I'd been doodling for years, but only then did I start making them, with the intention of making a series.


...But of course, I don't think that's the true turning point. The point where comics when from "serious" to "obsession" seems to have been after I joined. Probably February 2010, when I began playing in the Werewolf games. After that, comics seemed like...something I really wanted to do, as more than just a hobby.

But there's yet another turning point. They were an obsession, but despite my obsession, I never got devoted to a comic...until about a year and a half later, in late-2011, just before my return, when I focused on The Descended as the one comic that I WOULD make succeed.



So I wouldn't say there's a single point which qualifies, but several smaller points which directed me.

-I started drawing more frequently after my talent was pointed out.
-I started drawing more seriously after I began to make comics. (2005-2007ish.)
-I started drawing more obsessively after I joined ComicFury. (Early 2010.)
-I started drawing more directly after I realized I needed just one comic. (Late 2011.)

I started drawing my own comics at age 10 (in 1980). I wrote the comics as I drew them back then and I drew every day, pretty obsessively. But I don't think I got all that serious until three years later, right before high school. I'd had major surgery that summer and worked on my comics while recovering in the hospital. That really focused me on writing story arcs and character development.

By my sophomore year in high school, I was working on more than one superhero team comic. A friend who'd started drawing a comic series at the same time as me stopped working on that series and asked if I wanted to take over, so I did.

By 1994, I asked my then-fiancee to edit my comics and make story suggestions, which helped take the comics in a new direction. And by 1999, together we started the story that would become Due East and I did the art.

I think the majority of my seriouesnss spawned from the creation of Ryu's Krew. Prior to that, I had made two different comic series (which I may or may not post online, just for old times sake).

The very first being about a sonic fancharacter with a HORRIBLE backstory, filled with lots of angst and just, horrendous art. It was done in middle school, and just. ugh.

The next year I had gotten big into Sonic fandom and all that. So I made a new character (still somewhat following the Sonic style) and ended up depicting my character in a bunch of "random XDXD" situations. Really wasn't... -that- bad at the time. And I still treasure it to this day. I really should post it online so people will know where I really started, and where my old name, Ryuthehedgewolf comes from.

Then when I started Ryu's Krew after that (just a year later!) is when I really got down to business. I started learning the different aspects of creating comics, going from an unoriginal crappy cartoon style knocking off of random flash animation style and the sonic style still to my own over the course of 4+ years of drawing and practicing. Throughout high school I had a very serious, professional mindset about the entire thing, so it's really helped me to get where I am now.

I've been drawing as long as I can remember... First monsters and stuff I had dreams about, then airplanes, then Redwall fanart, then Bionicle fanart, then fanart of pretty much everything and finally original characters (le gasp!)
What happened to that thread where everybody posted their oldest artworks? That was one of my favorites. :D

Hahah, I have always drawn stuff, always. My family pretty much made up of artists, so from the beginning I was drawing, but nothing huge or actually finished. It wasn't until I was 12 or 13 in year seven that I actually started drawing seriously. It was a lot of god awful furry stuff until '09 and I was 15 that then I started to just draw straight up animals and portraits. That was also when I first started getting commissions from people I knew for drawings of their pets or their children, that continued up until late '10. Then I started seriously drawing comics... And yeah, ended up here.

I started to get into comic when I was 13, admiring a lot of old British cartoonists. I drew quite a lot back then, but obviously it was pretty awful. Then I started to try and improve my drawing skills last August when I started posting on Tumblr, then I started Fathead... and here we are...

I've been drawing for most of my life, like a lot of people here. My third-grade math notebooks were full of epic space battles (spaceships that were destroyed over the course of the drawing were scribbled out, of course) and convoluted mazes (some of which were virtually impossible to complete because of all the weird rules and objectives thrown in), but once I was introduced to Cowboy Bebop (specifically, The Ballad of Fallen Angels), I was immediately inspired to do my own sci-fi noir action story after I saw how cool it was.

However, I don't think I actually got serious about drawing until 2008ish, when I realized that cartooning was the best shot I had at making a living. Now, I'm still working on the same story, which at this rate means that I'll be doing it for the rest of my life.

... long long ago .. around 1980? playing RPG with friends i did a lot of the art for charcters and stuff - hung around with artists - got into graphic design and learned to airbrush ( with real air !! )

No computers still cost more than a car .. Refined honed and practiced till that was pretty much all I did, then a few years back .. well not sure on exact dates.

( but it was less than 10 years ago ? ) got into a massive accedent and couldnt draw anymore ( thanks to damage from the accedent ) but found these nifty programs that could kinda stand in for it ..

And started messing around with those as a subsitute. and , drawing is still painful so i mostly reserve it for textureing and small stuff, and work on photoshop , daz studio and bryce 7 ( started with poser 4 when it came out ) i always wanted to do a comic , sci fi , and have literally sketchbooks full of carp i came up with , another reason the world is so detailed is all this stuff has been hashed out and worked out. I do with i could do it hand drawn byt , what are you gonna do .. push on! :D

1981

Actually... I can't remember a time I wasn't drawing like a fiend, as a kid.

I always used to have fantasies about being some dashing theoretical physicist who make comic books in his spare time (my two life's dreams, neither of which have come true). My grandmother still has old crayon drawings I did of the universe and Carl Sagan (in a super-hero cape, flying through a nebula for some reason) as a kid.

As I got older I quickly realized my absolute abhorrent horror for anything even vaguely RESEMBLING authority in my life was going to keep me from excelling in a heavily-structured field like physics research, so I focused on drawing. For a long time I was getting REALLY good, people would usually be happy to buy my pencil doodles at stupid prices and walk away with a smile.

Well, then there were injuries, problems, and homelessness. Killed a lot of what I'd taught myself.

So... I guess I've been drawing forever. Huh.

NEVER!! =D

This is why when I decided I really wanted to make a Skyrim webcomic, the first thing I did was go to the official Skyrim board and ask if there were any artists around who would like to collaborate...

I mean technically I CAN sort of draw... sort of... but it takes me 5 hours to do what most "artists" can do in 5 minutes, and always leaves me feeling horrendously inadequate, which then leads to me curling up in the corner and going catatonic for a while. After that I decide it is best for me to just leave things like drawing to people who can actually do it without going into a crippling fit of depression and self-loathing.

Heck, I used to do a sprite comic once... a rather silly one... but I had a major falling out with the people I was essentially doing it for, so that just got scrapped. And every time I've thought of doing a webcomic since then, it pretty much never got past the planning stage...
At least until the current one... which involves what I'd consider minimal input on my part. I'm just the writer / ideas / website guy... and leave the artistry to... well... the artist.

Pretty sure I know well enough now to never try putting pencil to paper again myself. It'll just lead to another attempted suicide.