During the time I have been working on this blog, I have been on a quest to develop my artistic talent in a "respectable," "serious" way. When I graduated college I was still toying with the idea of going to art school and trying to become an Artist with a capital "A". Even when I knew art was most likely only ever going to be a hobby for me, I still wanted it to be a "serious" hobby.
I think this probably stems subconsciously from the fact that when I was growing up, my art was pretty much 100% either nerdy fan-art (I guess that's a little redundant) or mindless doodles. That got me a lot of positive attention from the other nerds in my life, but as I got older and wanted to connect more with "normal" people, drawing pictures of Zelda characters in my free time felt like more of a liability than an asset. For a long time I was just too embarrassed to admit to most people that I liked to draw at all. My only attempt at any sort of "serious" art had been copying from figure drawing books; since that involved nudity and since I had a very rigid, conservative upbringing, that was also not exactly something to brag about to most of the people around me. (I eventually threw away all my figure drawings, which is a real shame. I don't know that I really felt like I had done anything wrong, but my little sister found them and I was super embarrassed. I was 16 or 17 at the time.) Eventually I learned that I could at least share my portraits and doodles with people, but I still cringed whenever someone was flipping through my sketchbook and came across a drawing of something from a video game and asked me what it was.
Without question, learning to broaden my appeal beyond my nerdiest friends, learning about art history, and learning to use traditional media were an important part of the maturation process for me. Because I had been socially pigeonholed in high school, being able to connect with people with different backgrounds and interests was one of the most important goals for me throughout my early twenties. I was finally living in the real world, instead of the fantasy world I had often retreated to in order to escape from being bullied and abused. (This is the most emo way to possibly put this, but this song really spoke to me during this part of my life.)
And so, once I realized I had some actual artistic talent (and not just an above-average ability to copy drawings out of Nintendo Power comics), I never even questioned the impulse to apply that talent to something serious. To make Art with a capital A. Anything else would be silly, childish, a waste of time. I thought about pursuing a career in illustration, but I would have designed covers for serious books. Whatever I did, I was sure it would be esoteric, symbolic, significant. Pretentious, really.
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There were just a few problems with that plan. First off, although a lot of my friends joke about how pretentious I am, fighting my own impulse to be elitist is very important to me. Lots of artists have complete disdain for the public, and pride themselves in creating artwork that "ordinary people" don't like because they don't understand it. If ordinary people like what they've created, they've failed to create something really deep and meaningful. It's the whole stereotype of the misunderstood, tortured, "genius"--which is fine for someone who is actually misunderstood and tortured and is able to communicate their experiences visually better than they can verbally. The problem is, the vast majority of people who are able to make money by producing this kind of art are affluent white males--overall, pretty much the least "misunderstood" and "tortured" demographic on the planet. I'm a white male (albeit not an affluent one) who often feels misunderstood, but I know enough about the world to know that the last thing people need is yet another depiction of my particular brand of emotional turmoil. Probably because I am so close to fitting that stereotype, avoiding becoming that type of pretentious artist has been very important to me.
When I was first learning about (Western) art history, I really admired Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein--still affluent white males, but ones who had far more respect for their audience. They felt that everyday things like soup cans and comic books read by children were worthy of being blown up and displayed in a museum as "art." The more accessible to ordinary people, the better. Like them, I wanted to create art that people with absolutely no knowledge of art history and no access to my "tortured psyche" could still look at and say, "Hey, I like that a lot."
The other problem with my desire to create "serious" art was that I simply am not very good at it. I can't sit in front of a canvas and paint something esoteric and symbolic. And I don't care to sit there for hours mixing exactly the right color to paint one particular corner of a still-life. Despite all my efforts to become the type of artist who can be taken seriously in the world of professional postmodern art, I just don't care that much about it. The fact is, I learned to draw from copying pictures out of video game instruction booklets and Garfield comic strips, and even now, at age 27, I'm a nerdy cartoonist at heart. I don't draw because there is some esoteric truth inside me that can only be made manifest through my creative genius; I draw because it's fun.
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This isn't the blog post I intended to write. I recently went home for the first time in... 4 years? I think. Among other things, I went through some old boxes in my mom's house looking for my old artwork. I was hoping to find some evidence that I had been a budding creative genius from a very young age and find examples of how my exceptional talent developed over the years, so I could write a blog post about that. What I actually found was piles and piles of pretty much what you'd expect any three-year-old to draw, with my mom narrating the whole process by telling me how what I'd drawn when I was three was what most kids were drawing at age six. She was completely wrong about that, and it was actually quite sad. The only thing I found worth even sharing here was this surprisingly photorealistic depiction of the station wagon our family drove when I was 4:
The rest of what I found is not particularly impressive, but it's representative of how I learned to draw. The pictures that follow (as well as the opening image for this post) are all from high school, and they are all from TV shows or video games that I was into in my childhood:
Jenna and Felix from Golden Sun 1 and 2 (the opening image is of Mia, another main character from those games). It's kind of funny that I found this drawing in particular, because I used the exact same source image of Jenna in a piece I made a year and a half ago that I'll share in my next post.
Maylu from the Mega Man Battle Network TV series, and Static Shock, the titular character of probably the greatest superhero cartoon ever made. (No, these two have absolutely nothing to do with each other.)
Optimus Prime from Transformers, and Roll from the Mega Man series. Despite the stark contrast, these are in fact both robots.
Buster Bunny and Plucky Duck from Tiny Toons, the Samurai Pizza Cats (a Japanese parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove. (I know--reeeeeeally random combinations of characters here.)
Samus, both in and out of her armor, from one of the special endings of Metroid: Zero Mission. I feel like it's a pretty cool drawing, but all I can think about is how those arms are reeeeally skinny for someone who's supposed to be a bounty-hunting superhuman gymnast...
This one isn't from anything; it's actually the original depiction of the Battle Penguins, a group of superhero penguins I came up with in seventh grade who also made a more recent appearance in my adult sketchbooks. Apologies for some of the cringe-worthy stereotypes I relied on for character design here...
Some slight improvements in character design after looking at actual pictures of real penguins, as well as some other cartoon penguins.
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I'm writing this post now to share some of the stuff I did when I was younger, but also to sort of signal a new direction for my blog. Rather than focusing on using digital art as a way of practicing skills that will apply to oil paintings, I'm going to be focusing more on digital art for its own sake. I'll explain more about that in my next post, but the Reader's Digest version is just that I'm going to stop trying to make art the pursuit of something esoteric and serious, I'm working on embracing the part of me that is still a kid and is completely okay with that.