For the past five to six years, my field of academic interest has been Japanese language and culture, which was brought about by my love for anime. However, that was not the case for most of the years of my life. In fact, for quite a long time I thought my career would follow not the language and culture of anime, but its visual medium – animation and cartooning…
I’ve always been a big animation fan, as I’ve stated in many previous posts. Nowadays I get my fill of it by simply watching anime and animated movies. But for roughly the first seventeen years of my life, I not only watched cartoons all the time, but also drew them on a daily basis. Drawing was as big a hobby for me as blogging is now. I’ve saved most of my drawings from elementary school to high school, and if I were to stack them all in a pile, they’d probably be at least two feet high.
In this post, I invite you to take a peek at my old cartooning career and see how it eventually fizzled out in favor of other things. Oh, and feel free to laugh to yourself when you see my old kiddy drawings XD
And I apologize for the poor quality of some of the images. I don’t have a scanner and a digital camera isn’t the best way to take photos of pieces of paper.
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Starting from when I was in kindergarten, I loved to draw. Since I had a lot of cats in my childhood, they were the biggest inspiration for my drawings. Thus, for my years at elementary school, my classmates and teachers would think of me as “the girl who draws cats all the time.”
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Early cat sketches
Besides the real cats I had at home, my other first inspiration was the Garfield series (of which I had almost all the books). In fact, I think over half of all my drawings involving cats were based off of some strip or image from Garfield. I would insert either nameless cats or use my own cats in place of the Garfield characters. Heh, Jim Davis should have gotten a dollar for all the drawing ideas I copied from him XD
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The typical comics I used to draw
At one point I even made up my own superhero cat character, though I only drew him in regular pictures and not comic strips.
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My old made-up superhero, Cranio Kitty XD
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More sketches
Besides cats, my other huge drawing obsession in elementary school was Sonic the Hedgehog. I was a big fan of the old Sonic games on Sega Genesis and Game Gear. I loved drawing the characters in various scenes from the games.
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Sonic & Knuckles, one of my favorite old games
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More Sonic
Throughout elementary school and early middle school, I would also draw pictures of various other video game or toy characters.
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Beanie Babies; I can’t believe I would draw them with their tags on XD
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My fav Beast Wars: Transformers character
Before my anime fandom officially started with Pokemon in my second year of middle school, my last drawing craze again involved me copying ideas from the Garfield comics. This time however, I used two particular cats of mine as the characters – Malibu, a fluffy orange cat who played the role of Garfield, and Pip, a chubby black and white cat, who’d get the brunt of the jokes (playing the role of either Jon or Odie). “Malibu & Pip” is my biggest folder of drawings, with half of them being comic strips and half regular colored pictures.
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Typical M&P drawing
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Typical M&P comic
Malibu has since passed on but Pip, as old and senile as he is, is still around.
Finally in late 1998/early 1999, my Pokemon obsession began, and naturally it also became my next big drawing craze.
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A very early Pokemon drawing
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A Pokemon drawing from a few years later. Obviously I’ve improved a bit
My love for drawing Pokemon continued on to high school. However I also branched out into drawing pics from other older anime (for more difficult characters I would usually copy directly from a picture).
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One of many pages of random character doodles I made in high school
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Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo!. Wish I could draw this good all the time
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Some chibi Slayers characters
Finally, my last big drawing craze occurred in high school. In addition to drawing Pokemon and other occasional anime characters, I loved drawing fantasy creatures such as dragons.
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One of the better dragons I’ve drawn
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One of the best of my fantasy creature drawings
As you can see from my childhood filled with drawings, I really thought art/animation/cartooning would be the career path I wanted to take. I told all my teachers, friends, and family that that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up. I even took a drawing elective class in middle school and an animation class in my senior year of high school. Once I got into anime in high school, I decided that I wanted to be a manga-ka rather than a comic strip cartoonist. However, what started to change my mind was my first semester of junior college. I started off with Art as my major and had to take one of the prerequisite classes that involved drawing a lot of still life illustrations…and I hated it. Out of all the hundreds of drawings I had made up to that point, I never drew anything but cartoon-style characters. I dreaded having to take all these Art classes that required me to draw in a style I didn’t like nor was I good at.
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Still life shapes…so boring
However, during the same semester that I took the art class, I also took my first Japanese class and absolutely loved it. Thus, I decided to switch my area of focus from art to Japanese. My junior college didn’t offer Japanese as a major, so I got my A.A. in Liberal Studies and majored in Japanese language/culture when I transferred to a university.
Promptly after I took that art class at college, my desire to draw, which was so strong in my childhood, started to disappear. For the next five or so years after, I maybe made a few serious illustrations, but nothing more.
My loss of interest in becoming a manga-ka happened for a few reasons. One is that I simply became more into anime and preferred watching it rather than drawing it, since my drawings never came out as good as what I saw in anime. Basically my idea of what was aesthetically pleasing matured as I did. Also, once I became familiar with pixiv and deviantART, I realized just how amateurish my drawing talent is. I never learned to use nor had the programs and equipment to draw the kinds of masterpieces that the artists on those sites do with Photoshop, drawing tablets, etc,. While it takes me an hour to draw a character’s face in a way that’s only semi-satisfactory to me, many other artists can draw the character’s entire body in the same amount of time and in a much more professional way than I can. I never even learned to draw human anatomy, as I preferred drawing cartoon animals most of the time. In summary, life experience that I gained in my college years showed me that I can’t draw as fast nor as good as what would be required to be a cartoonist, much less a manga-ka.
However, I have developed some rough ideas for the manga I was thinking of creating if I can find someone who’d do the illustrations (a Bakuman-like team!) There’s also a novel I’d like to write, but again I would need an illustrator. I don’t have time for these two projects at this point in my life, but they’re something I’d eventually like to do if the opportunity ever came around.
I haven’t completely given up drawing though, as I still get inspired every now and then, like I did when Pokemon Black & White came out.
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After years of a drawing hiatus, I finally made this two months ago
Perhaps my drawings would be good enough for a children’s book? Who knows…I still haven’t settled into a career yet, so anything’s possible. If the teaching ESL/Japanese, or other jobs I try, don’t work out, maybe I could get back into drawing one day.
I am not an artist myself since I am really bad at drawing, even if I have a graphics tablet, which I have when I make my banners in Photoshop. On the other hand, my sister is talented… She usually draw stuff from her favorite anime and Pokemon. Of course she went on to studying Biomedical Engineering since art is more of a hobby than a job (it’s true that a person can make a lot of money, but not nearly as much as any type of engineering would).
Pokemon are so much fun to draw XD Their amazing variety of shapes and colors are never boring, and there are extremely simple ones to draw like Ditto and Diglett if you’re not good at drawing :3
Yeah, I think drawing has since become a small hobby of mine. But who knows, I could suddenly get a new wave of artistic inspiration later in life and want to get better at it.
Hey, that drawing of Ryoko is quite good. I liked to draw since I can remember, mostly dragons and warriors, and all that stuff , but I’m not very good at it. I always wanted to develop my drawing skills, but, as with every other skill, you have to be very dedicated to it, and I don’t have too much patience. It must take a hell of a lot of training to be as good as a lot of mangakas, but I think it would be worth the effort. It must be extremely gratifying express your emotions and thoughts through this medium. Even more if you get paid for it :P
Thanks, I copied that pic of Ryoko from one of the Tenchi manga volumes. I can copy human characters okay I guess (it takes me a long time though), but I can’t draw them in original poses.
I have a couple of friends who are talented artists and it always amazes me how they can whip out masterpieces in like, 10 minutes, where it would take me hours to draw the same thing XD
The Shikijika one is quite cute ^^
I started drawing anime things when I was ten, because of Pokemon. It took a freakin’ long time for me to actually start improving.
http://myna5194.deviantart.com
my ‘improvement meme’ in on my journal if you want to check it out ;)
Thanks ^^ I hadn’t drawn Pokemon in years so I’m glad I still have it in me.
Your drawings are nice =) I especially like pouting Faye. Back in the day I drew a series of pictures of each of the Pokemon human characters chibi like that. Chibi style is much easier for me to do since the anatomy is simpler XD
It’s good to draw every now and again. Personally, I find it rather therapeutic. ;)
and thank you! ^^ (if you have a dA, i’d love to add you ^^)
i actually only started drawing chibi this year, it’s so nice and easy
Oh wow. I love your drawings. They’re better than anything I can make. As I learned over the years, I’m a much better writer than an artist. Although I still like sketching the characters from the stories I write they are very bad compared to what other people can draw along with the mental picture I have of the character in my head.
Thanks~
I used to be a better artist than the average when I was a kid, but now that I’m an adult, I too have become a better writer. Blogging has helped me develop an appreciation for writing that I never had, though I do still get little bursts of drawing inspiration now and then.
Art is not my forte either, and over the past few year’s I’ve decided I enjoy collecting and viewing original anime-inspired or anime-styled artwork more than fanart based on actual series. That’s what I look out for when I go to the artist alleys at anime conventions nowadays. I have a deviantArt account for my photographs, but I haven’t had time to take some really interesting photographs in the past few months thanks to my schedule. But I did get some nice cosplayer photos at PMX this year!
I’m the opposite in that I like really good fan art from actual anime titles that look as professional or better than official art. That’s mostly what I buy when I go to conventions or what I bookmark on pixiv. But I could make an exception for especially good pieces that are to my liking, such as the ones you showed me from PMX =)
Ryoko was the best one. Do you know why? I’ll tell you why. It’s because Ryoko is fucking awesome, and my favorite female anime character ever.
Yeah, Ryoko is great. One of the original and best bad-ass female harem characters.
Wow, I see lots of imagination in the drawings you did as a little kid! The drawing of the Slayers chibis are my favorite out of the pieces you showed in this post, I have to say. They’re cute!
Drawing is one of my two base hobbies and first loves (the other being reading). I still have drawings I did starting from when I was in kindergarten, (which are done on the blank pages in books that have been passed on to my younger siblings) up until a couple of weeks ago. ^ ^ I love drawing, but perhaps you know that. And there’s still much I want to draw! I will likely *never* give it up!
But I totally agree with you about traditional art classes… >_< I've never liked traditional art classes myself; through them, I found that I have no interest in conventional techniques, helpful though they might be. Besides, by the the time I was able to choose to take art classes in high school, I'd already started drawing anime and manga-style and was happy with the way my skills were developing. It was like I'd found the way I was supposed to be drawing all along. That was a great feeling. ^ ^ Someday, I'd like to do manga or a webcomic, but we'll see.
And I also think it's great that while you realized that professional art wasn't goiong to be your career, you still are able to enjoy it as a hobby and part of other things you enjoy! It's good to be inspired to draw every now and again. ^ ^
Thanks~ I remember you showing me your drawings ^_^ Drawing and reading are great hobbies to have. I’m glad you keep developing your technique!
I think the cat one is cute, but your drawings need a lot of work. Atm, I agree you don’t have the skills to be a manga ka if you’re progressing at that rate. Most likely, you would need to rely on your writing skills more than your drawing skills. Also, I don’t think a lot of people do co-projects as well. Perhaps on an art book at comiket, but no, I think a publisher would hire someone that can draw and make a story at the same time. Not to be mean, but the drawings you have won’t really cut it for a children’s story either. There’s no movement, there’s uneveness, in your drawings. I don’t think you should give up, but also to know your strengths too. Drawing isn’t the best strength. You shouldn’t skip out on human anatomy classes either. That class will teach you how to draw a body. Sometimes learning directly from cartoons can distorting.
Also, being a manga ka isn’t the best job in the world. It’s not the most comfortable one either. They work for long hours for little pay. Only the best selling ones get decent paychecks.
I am an artist. I’m not good AT ALL at copying other peoples art. Can’t do it. I think what you should do is create you own. So theres nothing to compare it too. You’d be surprised at what you can do.