From doodling to drawing

The long road I had to becoming an artist
On
May 17, 2010
It's common that I keep my artwork and drawing hobby very brief among different people. Growing up, I was very shy, and didn't hang out in crowds much. Before the mid 90's came around, I was having a hard time making friends, and the neighborhood I lived in seemed like a bad influence despite the violent and trash-mouthed people that lived there.

But as I sat in my house, eyes glued to the T.V., inspiration was born. Nothing else clicked in my mind except cartoons. Whether it was the Saturday morning type or the kind you find while getting ready for school, I started making doodles in the middle of my Third grade year of school.



And even though there were cartoons I missed on when they aired, my brother had a few VHS tapes of certain shows he liked (unfortunately, Transformers wasn't one of them). Each show had a different concept, an interesting cast of characters, and stories of different genres.

My drawings were complete crap at the time, but I didn't mind how they looked, and just drawing more often slowly got my skill a little better. I got maybe a few "hey that looks good" to "I could do better".

Two years later, some of my classmates asked if I could draw cartoon characters on a piece of paper or put them on a greeting card they made. Now, copyrighted cartoon characters at the time were at a high difficulty level. I could draw Garfield and Sonic the hedgehog with a decent design, but to me they were poor. But they were accepted anyway...



Hell, even simple looking characters like Megaman were a challenge. There's a certain style that goes by how these characters are drawn. Not everybody can get anybody else's work to perfection, but it can be fun nonetheless. Speaking of which, video game characters also inspired me.

The years slipped by after that. I still continued to make drawings for people, but I felt that it got stale after a while. Before the year of 1999 rolled over, I felt that it was time to get back into drawing, however I would no longer focus on drawing copyrighting characters. I felt it was time that I put my imagination to the test and breathe new life into my favorite hobby.

This was my first ever character I'd come up with. I didn't have much of a story for this character the first year I drew him, just that he would be an Indian from the future. Yeah I know, it sounds miserably cliche, but again, I had a hard time brainstorming a good story. His name is, to this day, Lars Dakota.

When 2001 came around, I wanted to add in a secondary character, thus focusing on Lars wouldn't be as frequent as it used to be. This new character would be named Katie, and would be a tag-along character. At the same time, I was dealing with depression living with my parents and their constant arguments.

Because of this, I decided to change Katie's role and have her in a completely different story and timeline. Originally, she was this goofy, happy-go-lucky character, and I soon changed her to a spunky goth girl as my experience with depression worsened.



I had a few friends in school, at the cafeteria and in classes, who absolutely loved this character. I decided to give her a little monster companion, though his name was unknown at the time because I couldn't think of a good beast-like name for him. Some of her features, such as the skull hair berets, took some time getting used to drawing them as I wanted them to be, but I had fun brainstorming the design for her.



It wasn't until 2004 that I had an actual story planned for her, titled "Blooded Moonlight". It takes place in Alabama, in the late decade of the 80's. I spiced up the design too, as I gave her cargo pants, bat earrings, sneakers, and fishnets wrapped around her arms. A few of my friends thought at first that the fishnets were oven mittens.

Since her story takes place so far back in years, I decided to go back to Lars and where he would fit in after I was through with Katie's stories. I would have him be the son of Katie in the late saga of the stories.

In conclusion, I hope more possibilities await as I look forward to enroll in an art school. I enjoy drawing as much as anything else I take interest in in life.

Well, that's it for this article. See you next time, folks!

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