ooking at myself back then. Geez. It's been quite a while since I first picked up that pencil and began doodling. I surely have discussed this in the past, but if you are a first time reader and you have never heard this story; first off, welcome. You are in for a treat.
Ever since I was a young child, I had been timid and not very talkative. Having Central Auditory Processing Disorder, or CAPD for short, it affected the way my brain was able to process auditory information, such as difficulty in localizing sound or difficulty in understanding spoken language in competing messages, in noisy backgrounds, in reverberant environments, or when presented rapidly, and I often needed words or sentences repeated.
Every artist was first an amateur.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
THE IMAGE IS ALREADY IN THE ARTIST'S HEAD BEFORE THEY EVEN TOUCH THE PENCIL.
I was pretty much Max from the children's show Max and Ruby, just a boy silently intrigued with the world he saw around him and wanted to learn from that. I have tremendously improved since those days to reassure you. And yet looking back, what I made up for my lack in verbal skills, I made up in my non-verbal skills such as the ones I learned from animated cartoons.
Just like every child, I grew up watching a plethora of cartoons, many I still fondly remember and enjoy to this day. I was such a fan of this genre that even today I continue to indulge and appreciate all the hard work and substance animation brings to children and adults alike. But that's another topic for another day. As I was saying, I loved all of these shows growing up, from their different styles in animation to the designs of the characters. So I did what any hyperactive kid did at my age, replicate some of their behaviors and began drawing my own fan-art of these characters. I excitedly grabbed that pencil and began doodling from memory (since I was too young to know what a computer was) each of my favorite characters. Of course, they didn't look amazing, but to me they were special.
From these early drawings, they taught me a very basic skill in art - Almost everything is based in simple shapes and geometry. For example, one simple character I drew a ton of was Spongebob. Created by Stephen Hillenburg, Spongebob's basic design came from the fact that was entirely a square with some rhombuses to give him the proportions of a character that has depth. This was another lesson I learned from drawing these cartoon characters a lot, proportion. I was able to understand the methods to size and shape these characters, so they looked right to our eyes. And I have certainly perfected this over the course of the years, through my most recent work as you see right above, who I named Charlotte.
In actuality, as my childhood was filled with the creative need to express myself through a visual form, it helped me continue to expand my knowledge in the skills of illustrating subjects/characters within a composition, I kind of fell off drawing during my early adolescent years until I arrived to high school. I first attempted a couple of early images that incorporated figure-drawings of myself, some of my friends, and some original character design I came up with. Compared to Charlotte above, those early drawings back in high school were anything but clean. They were still rough in their design and line-work, but still creative from an imaginative side. Throughout my high school years though, I practiced more and more and with help from a very important tool, my drawings wouldn't look as good as they do today.
I used the Internet, one of man's greatest inventions in sending and receiving information across the world. I used this tool a tremendous amount of times to help me improve my drawing to what they are today. I was able to look at images of figure models to understand and better my proportions for the human body, and watch videos that demonstrated techniques of how to accurately depict facial features and proper shading amounts for my subject. From high school up until college, I continued on this path of self-improvement and greatly built upon my existing skills into illustrations that look amazing.