Through the Years

I mainly did this piece as a Facebook cover but I wanted to share it here, too. I wanted to show a quick line up of some of the characters I've created over the past eight years of my life. 2005 is the year I consider to be the start of the growing period of my interest in sketching and telling stories. Every once in a while I step back and take a look at where I've been and I see how far I've come from drawing stick figures, and I impress myself.

I've only ever taken a few basic classes on art and got tired of them easily. But I never stopped drawing. I consider myself to be mostly self taught and that's what I believe to be the best way to learn. I never took a class to teach me how to do shading. How to use basic shapes to build the structure of a body to get the proportions correct. Instead, I just did what I enjoyed doing and pushed myself to improve at my own natural pace, learning as I went along and developing my own unique style.

Now, I'm not downplaying the importance of taking classes on art, those are very, VERY useful if Art is going to be your career. I speak from the perspective of someone who loves to draw as a hobby, something fun to do to pass the time. I want to serve as an encouragement for those who love to draw but don't see a career as an artist in their future. You may think your art is not as good as others, or that you'll never be as good as 'that person', but that doesn't matter.

So long as YOU enjoy what you make and continue to push yourself in your creativity, that's all that really matters. Don't rely solely on the words of others to say whether what you made is good or not. You should be the one to say, "I did a good job!" Take pleasure in what you make now, and smile as you look forward to what masterpieces you'll create in the time ahead.

Sorry for the wall of text, but this was something that has been on my heart for some time now and I hope that it encourages others.