MY ART JOURNEY! or, sharing cringe art from my past...

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Since this time of year is always accompanied by nostalgia, I thought I’d share with you a bit of my old (and admittedly embarrassing) art and journey as an artist. This is going to be a long one, so bear with me. I'm sure you'll get a few laughs out of these. So, let me take you all back, ALLLLL the way back to 2004…

I would always doodle on my notebooks in school, but in 7th grade my friends and I began writing our own Aqua Teen Hunger Force comics. Each comic was only about a page or two, but we made over 100 issues during that school year, categorizing them into “seasons” and ending our run with a “movie” which was a 10-page comic that we all collaborated on! Each of us got one page and the next person would work off that until we were done. I no longer have these comics, but I do have this doodle that one of my friends made from that era… 

At the private school I went to, my classmates and I moved to each class together, so we saw each other at all times of the day. We even collaborated on these comics during weekends and shared them with the other students. Here, I learned how gratifying it is to have others enjoy something you made and have them ask for more.

The following year in 8th grade, I was put into a different class from my two friends. We wanted to continue, but it was difficult now that I rarely saw them during class time. We didn’t have phones to call or text each other back then and we obviously didn’t have cars, so we were limited to seeing each other in the halls and sometimes after school. We even had assigned seating during lunch, so we couldn’t collaborate there either. They continued working on the comics, but I decided that I wanted to do my own thing. My two friends were much better than I was at drawing, and even though they thought my crappy art made the comics funnier, I wanted my art to be good. I decided to teach myself how to draw in a “manga” style. So, I picked up these two books while at Borders.

This was me seriously wanting to learn how to draw. I had always wanted to, but it just seemed like it would be a tremendous amount of work (it is). Buying these was more about me making a stand and wanting to genuinely improve. And the only way to improve, is to draw! I came up with an idea for a Shonen-like manga, bought a large Five-Star ring notebook and began drawing…

Thankfully, I still own all of the art I made from late 2004 through college. The influence obviously came from the anime I was consuming at the time. Dragon Ball, Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, Full Metal Alchemist, FLCL, Inuyasha… If you grew up around that time, we probably had a similar anime diet. I came up with the characters first, gave them back stories, wrote their profiles, and just came up with the scenes in my head while listening to anime openings on my iPod Nano. I still remember that at night while everyone was sleeping, I’d sometimes get out of bed and act out the fight scenes in my room with the lights off…

I think I started drawing my actual manga around October 2005. It was called “The Seven” and involved characters that received special elemental powers and whose power could be collectively transferred to the main character’s blade, the Soul Saber! The protagonist's name was Maikeru Urashima, a handle which I later used online for many years. The name comes from the Japanese romanization of my own name (Michael) with the last name of the protagonist from Love Hina (Keitaro Urashima).

Another one of my close friends was still in my class in 8th grade and he was my sole audience. Every time I would finish a chapter (about 7-10 pages at the time) I would share them with him and get his thoughts on it. I would use stick figures to represent the characters from a distance and draw the character’s face when the scene called for it. With this method, I was able to pump out pages very quickly.

By the end of that school year, I had drawn over half of that notebook and made roughly 30 chapters. More people in my class were interested in reading it and I even inspired another classmate to start his own comic! I got so invested in making it, I even colorized the entire first volume with color pencils.

While I was drawing my manga, I also drew one-off drawings of my characters and concepts for ideas that I would draw way down the line. I even came up with an idea for a movie and a sequel series! Before you ask, yes, I did most of my drawings during class. It sure made time pass by way faster for me!

Around this time is when I started drawing my female characters more. I’d keep all of these hidden and only share them with close friends. I felt embarrassed about anyone seeing them…

8th grade passed and I drew a bit in the summer, but going on to high school would be the first time all my friends would be completely separated from me, as we would all be attending different schools. I suddenly lost my audience. I would be limited to sharing my progress with them on the weekends, when we could see each other. Even then, it felt a bit forced at this point to ask them to read something I had made when we could be using that time to play video games or something. None of them ever complained or showed disinterest towards reading it, but I felt like I was making them read it out of obligation, not a genuine interest.

At the start of 9th grade, I bought a fresh notebook and began working towards the next installments of my manga, only now I had switched over from drawing with erasable pens (which were awful) to mechanical pencil! Mechanical pencil is still my preferred way to sketch!

I also bought a sketch pad, to draw my characters without the aid of the notebook lines. I wanted to draw updated versions of my characters now that I had gotten better and was more familiar with them.

Around this time, I started making more art of my female characters. I didn’t have as many eyes on my work anymore, so I felt comfortable just making art for myself. I started collecting references and drawing poses that I liked. I also started making them a bit “sexier”, although I was still too much of a prude to draw any nudity. I blame my religious upbringing… I also though it was “weird” to think that drawings could be sexy, again leading to being very protective of who I showed my art to.

My manga work was getting a bit better. I wanted to move away from drawing stick figures in scenes and completely draw the characters. I wanted to learn how to make dynamic scene boxes for pages and not constricting everything to a rectangle or a box.

My chapters were getting longer and more detailed, but they were also becoming draining to make. Without the incentive of a consistent audience to enjoy what I was making, I started working on it less and less. By the time I got to 10th grade, working on this project felt pointless and so, "The Seven" ended its run mid-chapter…

This incomplete page is kind of sad to me. When I see it, I immediately remember what was going on in my head at the time. “This is silly. No one is going to take this seriously. It’s derivative.”

I also felt like I had plateaued with my art. It was better than it had ever been, but I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere or getting any better. My manga would never take off anyway. What was the point? I stopped drawing regularly at this point…

I graduated high school and moved to my community college where I was thankfully reunited with some of my friends from middle school and merged that group with the friends I made in high school. It was a great, liberating period of my life, filled with a lot of free time. I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but while I had friends over for a game night, one of my old friends mentioned my old manga and if I ever continued it. I mentioned to them what happened, and then pulled it out for them to peer through. He told me that it was super nostalgic looking through it again and it made me really happy to hear him say that.

I then got the inspiration to retell the story but make it set in a fantasy world. Give each of the characters a different appearance and roles and age up the story to not feel as “shonen”.

Just like I had before, I drew concepts onto my sketch pad, made small character bios and ideas for scenes. This time, I wanted to focus on the world building. I made nations, drew their logos, and wanted to tell a richer story, filled with moments of triumph and tragedy. It would have been about a war that tore multiple nations apart.

In 2012, I finished community college and continued my studies at another campus. I was once again away from my friends, but with a newfound interest in art I had more than enough inspiration to keep myself occupied. I continued drawing all over my college notes… I was a good student though, if you could believe it!

Eventually, one of my old buddies who worked on the Aqua Teen comic with me handed me a bootleg copy of Photoshop on a flash drive. The program felt overwhelming with its options, but all I wanted to do was add color to my sketches. This here is the first project I ever made on Photoshop:

I didn’t know what I was doing, but adding color to my sketches made them feel so much more real. Even at the time, I knew this was bad, but I still wanted to improve. I even bought my first tablet to make working on these projects easier!

I never did end up starting on the reboot manga, despite drawing the characters for it. I thought it might be cool to add them into an RPG Maker game at some point, but that would be WAY TOO MUCH WORK! Now, I was just drawing what I wanted to draw. I started making fanart of characters I liked. Here is a Lightning I made around 2013.

I was really starting to like my own art style. I started collecting even more references and finding more characters that I just had to draw in my style! Here is one that I was very proud of at the time. It's of Elsa from Frozen which I made for my sister's birthday. This happens to be the first drawing I made that I drew proper line art for instead of just coloring under the scanned sketch layer.

Shortly after, I also drew Mila for the first time!

Maikeru, the character from my manga, had become a sort of mascot for my art as a brand and I redrew him in a chibi style to place along my signature. I redrew him each year, seeing bigger progress each time.

I also drew some pin-up sketches, experimenting with different styles to see what would work.

And this is pretty much what I did all throughout college. My classes all had computers, so instead of doodling on a notebook during a lecture, I had Photoshop open and was drawing there instead, with a mouse, I might add! (I didn’t want to bring attention to myself by taking out my tablet). I became known as "the artist" in nearly all of my classes. I really didn't like all the attention I was getting... But it still felt nice that I was getting recognized again.

By 2017, I had become comfortable with myself as an artist. It was fair to say that I had surpassed my friends from middle school at this point. They went and got themselves REAL jobs with high pay! What a bunch of losers! (Love you guys). I went back and redrew some of my old art, now that I was very familiar with Photoshop and was blown away by my own progress.

I had an overnight job around 2018, and I was so efficient with what I needed to do, I’d get all the night’s work done in about 2 hours, then have the rest of the night to work on my art alone, in peace. Here are some of the pieces I vividly remember working on at the time:

By now, I had become comfortable with my own style and with myself. I had long since shed the idea that art couldn’t be sexy. Art has been inspiring others since recorded history after all! Now that I knew that I could, I wanted to start dabbling in NSFW art. Maybe it would bring more attention to the rest of my work, who knows? From there, I went on to work on Crimson Veil, and the rest is history. I was finally able to tell a complete story and share it with an audience that enjoys it.

This has been a lot of fun for me to go through. I'm glad I've kept all my old stuff, even if it sucks. As you can see, I have a lot...

It’s been a long journey, but the ride’s not over yet. Art has been a defining part of me and creating it gives meaning to my life. Thank you all for being a part of that. I hope you enjoyed my story. Here's to another 20 years!