Hmm, don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, so time for a relevant intro story with some of my oldest art pieces~ I know it’s kind of long, but I’ve always wanted to tell it to someone else in the hopes of inspiring someone that it’s never too late to start a hobby.
I don’t want to clutter this thread too much with such a long post, so click on the dropdown arrows below if you want to read~
The Spark
I only started drawing back in Mid-2016, anything done before that was mainly a comic featuring 2 crudely drawn stickmen figures (Smartie and Dum Dum).
Earlier that year my dad bought Undertale for my birthday gift, and I loved the game. That didn’t actually spark my interest in art though, until I came across an Undertale Alternate Universe comic on Tumblr, “Underline AU”. I adored the art style so much, the 2 artists drew Asriel and Chara really well and adorable, and that was when I started trying to draw, under the aspiring goal of being able to draw cartoons as well as them.
First Steps
At first, I traced their art, but it didn’t spark a lot of accomplishing feeling in me, knowing I could never call the finished pieces my own. So I took to copying art pieces instead, but I didn’t blindly copy; Every stroke I made, I tried to understand what part of the drawing I was working on. Needless to say, it was effective in teaching me some fundamental stuff like anatomy and basic proportions. It wasn’t the best, but it worked! Eventually I didn’t copy, but referenced drawings instead, creating my first original pieces, and man that felt good~ This was my first original drawing, and I drew it for those artists as a piece of fanart.
Going Digital
By the end of 2016, one of my few Tumblr followers told me I should try drawing digitally. I told them that’s impossible, I only had a mouse and MS Paint on Windows XP. But just to show them I drew this as my very first digital art piece to “prove them wrong”:
Surprisingly, they said it was a really good attempt and I should continue, and so I did, trying to familiarise myself with MS Paint’s extremely limited variety of tools while still practicing my drawing skills traditionally. I eventually tried my hand at drawing someone else’s story in MS Paint (You should click the image to see the entire comic strip below):
And wow, I realised I did have potential, and so I made more and more MS Paint stuff, from gift cards to misc. pieces of fanart to other artists who continued inspiring me
MS Paint Stuff
And finally my very last MS Paint artpiece
Into the Real World
At around early 2017, someone actually…well…pirated an art program for me by the name of “Paint Tool SAI”. They told me while my art was impressive, they believed I could be even better if I had a better set of tools in my hands. I remembered getting completely lost when I opened the program the first time, it was so much more complicated than MS Paint. I actually got discouraged from drawing, cuz I didn’t think I could learn how SAI worked, and every time I drew on MS Paint, I felt like I was wasting my skills on such a basic program.
But then, I remembered why I started drawing in the first place: I wanted to draw cute and gorgeous cartoons and characters. So I sat at my computer and spent 10 hours straight working on my first SAI piece, learning the basics of SAI’s many functions and powers:
I was so happy, I realised I could actually draw on SAI, and I finally shifted my main art program from MS Paint to SAI…and of course, I got better and better at it as time flew by. I drew a bit less frequently during 2017-2019 rather than everyday since I was busy with school work and gaming, but I still kept improving, bit by bit, even without drawing for extended periods of time. I thought people were supposed to get rusty if they didn’t do something for awhile, but that never stuck to me, I still got better without drawing anything for months… I guess that’s a talent I really appreciated~
More early SAI stuff
Drawing Tablet and Final Words
My aunt recognised my love for art, so she actually went ahead and bought a Wacom Drawing Tablet for Christmas 2017. I set it all up, but much like the transition from MS Paint to SAI, it felt too daunting a task for me to actually transition from computer mouse to drawing tablet, and so I never used the drawing tablet for a whopping 1 year.
It was only earlier this year that I finally pushed myself to using the drawing tablet, and that was also around the time I came across another artist inspiration that inspired a change in art style for me, Squeakwee. This was the very first piece I did entirely with a drawing tablet (funny how it’s still Undertale related, it was a fandom I really enjoyed being part of, if you close your eyes from its corrupted/negative shadow) :
And so yea! I got familiar with the drawing tablet, but old habits die hard, so I actually draw 50% of my art pieces with the tablet, and the other 50% with my mouse even till this day. Now this art story’s got a new chapter: RotMG and a RotMG Fan-Comic, and I’m really excited to see what comes out of this <3
What this all has taught me is that if you really care and put your heart into your passion, it can work out and it’s never too late to start your journey. I never thought I’d make it this far, but I did, all thanks to an awesome game and 2 motivating artists, as well as the other great artists I’ve met in the past alongside my followers~
Whew that was quite a write-up, but if you’ve read everything, thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed my art journey story. I also told this story just in case someone would question why most of my non-related RotMG art was Undertale-related. Kill 2 birds with 1 stone x)