While I've always tried to gauge myself by my own previous work, I will say...My Uncle is fifty years old this year, and a master oil painter. He does mostly seascapes,a nd makes assloads of money from it. But he can draw ANYTHING, I mean anything, with amazing skill and depth with just a sharpie. He used to draw me and my brother cartoons on napkins when we were little. When I was working in his studio I was rather amazed, cause I assumed his other work/illustration wasn't as good as his seascapes. But I was wrong. Sure, the seasapes are a little more well developed, but his other stuff is STILL amazing, and if he actually had the time to finish some of the stuff, I bet it'd be more detailed. But he's also like.. a 3rd or 4th generation artist. So I think he had some advantage, having been raised/born into art and art galleries (his parents were gallery owners).

I don't try to belike him art wise, his cartooning (his 'style' when he used to do cartooning) is very unlike mine, but I get access to his studio and his supplies and advice, that's enough for me. And my idea is that an artist who wants to be 'as good as' another artist lacks ambition.

I still won't reveal my age. Although I will say that I was born in the year 1993.

Mega Josh
I still won't reveal my age. Although I will say that I was born in the year 1993.

Good job not revealing your age.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm 18 years old and suck and any artform. Last time I actually DREW something, it came out horribly and I ripped the paper to shreds, frustrated at my inability to make things look the way I wanted them to.

Screw age when it comes to talent... no matter how old you are, if your head is screwed up like mine is, you're not going to have "talent"

Im 24 and I can only say that Alot of people have told me that my art Is bad ass. I dont think My art is any better or any worse than anyones because its impossible to rate such a thing. Look at the late Charles M. Shultz's Comic strip peanuts. His art obviously is a varidable cornocopia of poorly drawn squiggles. But he is internationally syndicated and known by people even in japan and africa. Its not how well you draw but how much love you put into your art that really matters i think.

Charles Schultz COULD draw though. Very well in fact. He was quite the artist. But what makes Peanuts great isn't the fact that it's drawn by a really great artist. What makes it great is that Schultz used to strip to look into human nature. Every character was full of problems, but each tried. In the end Schultz depicted life as full of trials and tribulations, but also so absurd that you couldn't help to sit back and laugh at it, because you were part of it too. Every character in the series has facets of their personality that resonate with the reader.

Personally I'm of the opinion that it's necessary to know how to draw from life before being able to be considered a good artist. True, there have been painters that don't know how to draw, but then again they tend to be rather eccentric and cater to a very select group of (usually) pretentious individuals. For the rest of us, it's probably a good idea to be able to render what you see onto a page as faithfully as you can. It trains the eye and betters the motor skills of the artist.

ccs1989
Personally I'm of the opinion that it's necessary to know how to draw from life before being able to be considered a good artist.

I think that if one can mae aesthetically appealing work, one is a good artist.
You don't necessarily need to be able to draw from life, that's a specific skill. And think of people who are good at stylized comics here, but can't draw real-life pictures. It doesn't negate their artistic ability. Although.. the most amazing artist I've ever met is this friend of mine, and he can draw/paint anything ANYTHING ANYTHING and he can play the guitar and sculpt. He's 36 though so that may have a role in his skill level.

Kristen Gudsnuk
I think that if one can make aesthetically appealing work, one is a good artist.

It depends. Of course art is defined in many different ways, and people vary in their ideas of what they think is good art, but usually people who make "aesthetically appealing" art can only draw in the style which they have laid out for themselves. Art needs to grow and change in order not to stagnate, which is why it's necessary to have a good foundation in reality. Those with skill enough to be able to train their hand and eye to draw what they see will have the potential to become master artists, while the ones who just latch on to a particular style and don't want to learn the basics will always just be "okay".

You don't necessarily need to be able to draw from life, that's a specific skill. And think of people who are good at stylized comics here, but can't draw real-life pictures.

What are they stylizing? An idea in their head of how people should look? The reason most people stylize is because they don't know any other way of drawing, or they find the style easier. I don't care how visually appealing a style is if the person doesn't know how to draw from life. Life is the foundation. Every style is just a simplification of those fundamental foundations of what people and objects actually look like. A style might make something more visually interesting, but for the most part the style relies on the fact that the person has a general idea of what something appears to be but is too lazy to get references.

The way I see it, drawing is like making a house. Once you know how basic architecture works, you can add any little flourishes you want to break the boundaries of design and create something new and different. But if that new and different house doesn't have solid, basic foundations, the whole thing crumbles.

Yeah. I've already put in furniture without any regards to the foundation, which I'm only working on now. Should be okay though. I've been given the gift of improving greatly in such little time. So, practice makes perfect. Or perfect enough.

AQua_ng
Yeah. I've already put in furniture without any regards to the foundation, which I'm only working on now. Should be okay though. I've been given the gift of improving greatly in such little time. So, practice makes perfect. Or perfect enough.

Well, I did the same thing. I regret it now though, because my drawing ability didn't really rise much with my comic. Now that I'm drawing realistically I'm getting better though.

Unfortunately with comic pages there are deadlines. >:-(

Lol yeah, I used to draw some dragon ball z stuff and be like "I am teh ownage and I pwnzors anyones art. I'ma go to japan and own everyone!". But then my brother started tp "spit knowledge at me" and said you need to know how to draw from life before drawing the cartoons. Luckily I realised that very early on. I realised that at the age of 10.....practiced realism for years and now my cartoon sketches are way better.

"I've been given the gift of improving greatly in such little time."

Lol me too....well I have no life so I can draw from 1 hour to 5 hours a day....and once in a week I spent like the whole days drawing and used like 120 peices of paper practicing. So it's either I imrpove greatly in a short time or I have no life. I prefer to think it's the first option.

I hope that by 15 I will be teh "pro".

Span of 2 years ago:



This year:


What I'm most happy about is that 2 years ago it took me 45 minutes to draw that page. 1 year ago it took me 30 minutes to draw that page. Now this year it took me like 15 minutes to draw that page....I remember when I used to draw hands. Lol, I look back and laugh at it.

This is probably the only time I will say my age (because this is kinda my intro duction) but I am 13. Gonna try to publish a book in late next year (>,<).

I'm 18 and i CHOOSE to draw in a stylized manner. I can draw quite well from life, but it's not conducive to comics. My work is stylized, yes, but that doesnt make it any worse than someone who draws from life.

I'm 29.

I do my own thing.

I Don't want to draw like any one else, I just roll it out.

Avid
Lol yeah, I used to draw some dragon ball z stuff and be like "I am teh ownage and I pwnzors anyones art. I'ma go to japan and own everyone!". But then my brother started tp "spit knowledge at me" and said you need to know how to draw from life before drawing the cartoons. Luckily I realised that very early on. I realised that at the age of 10.....practiced realism for years and now my cartoon sketches are way better.

"I've been given the gift of improving greatly in such little time."

Lol me too....well I have no life so I can draw from 1 hour to 5 hours a day....and once in a week I spent like the whole days drawing and used like 120 peices of paper practicing. So it's either I imrpove greatly in a short time or I have no life. I prefer to think it's the first option.

I hope that by 15 I will be teh "pro".

Span of 2 years ago:



This year:


What I'm most happy about is that 2 years ago it took me 45 minutes to draw that page. 1 year ago it took me 30 minutes to draw that page. Now this year it took me like 15 minutes to draw that page....I remember when I used to draw hands. Lol, I look back and laugh at it.

This is probably the only time I will say my age (because this is kinda my intro duction) but I am 13. Gonna try to publish a book in late next year (>,<).

Excellent Progress

Avid
"I've been given the gift of improving greatly in such little time."

Lol me too....well I have no life so I can draw from 1 hour to 5 hours a day....and once in a week I spent like the whole days drawing and used like 120 peices of paper practicing. So it's either I imrpove greatly in a short time or I have no life. I prefer to think it's the first option.

Check out my improvement.

2nd and 4th sketches are mine. 3rd one is my sister. 1st one...I'll leave it for you to guess. :)






This was done in like an hour of something.

That's good. I can't bear to draw a realistic hand. I improved most over my vacation. I usually have a folder that I like to fill in a certain amount of time. Like over the summer vacation on the first week I drew on like 200 peices of paper. I use a lot of paper cause I have alot of time on my hands ( I stopped doing that because I don't wanna waste too much paper, no matter how much I improve, lols.) But then again laziness over comes me and I just take a break. My brother taught me to practice the hard things first and you will become better at the easy things. That's what helped me improve. The only reason the comic page looked how it did is because I drew it to specifically be easy to ink with the path tool in photoshop. If I was to actually take out the time to draw a page I don't even know how good it would be.

I saw some 9 -11 year old (I forget) that was able to draw better than most of the people I seen on this website. It's stuff like that, that gets me to draw. When I get a wacom tablet In 2 days I should be able to redraw that page and make it look better than it does.



That was my first comic at 10. All I drew was manga and that's the point I stayed at until 11 when my bro told me to draw american style. I only drew like 5 months when I was 11 and 12. So I got to the point I'm at in 2 years really. I think if kids realized that you should learn realism early on, they would be able to draw at a younger age too. Age does matter alittle but not too much.

I write too much, lol.

I'm 19 and consider myself to be of average skill~ I'm better than some, but there's far more artists who are more skilled than me~!

Age matters because no matter how talented you are, you need time and experience to hone your skills.

I'm older than you teenage dudes and I draw better than a lot of you, but I look at even my latest work and I still feel I suck, saying things like "OMGWTF how could I have messed that panel up!?!" and such.

But, I know I'm much better than I was when I was your age. When I was in junior high school, I had a friend who was a phenomenal artist. He could draw pages that are near Marvel in quality, without trying hard. My art could not touch his at the time.

Nowadays, if I compare my skill to what his skill was back then, I can say I'm on par with him in most areas. No... almost on par. But, it's not like he's dead - who knows how good he is nowadays.

So time -and therefore age- makes a big difference. The only time it doesn't, is if you're dead.

Well I don't think age matters at all. I draw 10 times better than all the adults I know (cept for one)and I'm a freshman.*pwn'd* As long as you draw all the time you can only get better. I know how I started out. DBZ!! then when i got some maturity I realized that it was stupid to sit and draw goku for seventy-billion hours. Now I can draw actuall people, backgrounds, and any other crap that comes to my mind just because i practiced..

im gonna be 17 in october, but i was prettymuch self taught since i was like...5. so my art aint the best out there, but its good enough for the world i reckon

I'm 15 as of two days ago, and I like to think that my drawings are at least somewhat pleasing to the eye. I'm trying to get better, but I'm way too damn lazy to learn the ins and outs of Photoshop. I've also been drawing on and off for a few years now, starting with a god-awful mockery of what is now known as Victory Theme.

Funny thing: when I first started drawing, I never drew the backs of heads. My early drawings looked like this .

It's so cool finding out everyone's ages! :D Some of them are a surprise to me.

I'm still happy I'm not the youngest person on DD! Yay :D

I'm 24 and have no real art skills, very juvenile compared to people younger than me. But for some/most of you it's a lifelong passion and a natural talent, while I'm new to it. My passion growing up was writing, and I could always write better than people older than me. I even had teachers when I was in school who asked me to critique and proofread things for them (grant proposals, newspaper articles, etc.).

I don't think age has much to do with anything. I think there are 2 factors involved:

1. Natural talent -- some people just have an eye for art and a hand to match.
2. Practice and learning -- regardless of when you start, the more you put in, the more you'll get out.

The only real difference as far as age is that people learn things more quickly when young. If you start early, you'll get better faster, and you won't have as many bad habits and techniques to "unlearn."

Why do you draw, then? Why don't you just write?

What possesses a man who doesn't draw, to suddenly decide he wants to draw comics at age 24?

mlai
Why do you draw, then? Why don't you just write?

What possesses a man who doesn't draw, to suddenly decide he wants to draw comics at age 24?

First... I'm a woman. ;)

Second... Writing descriptions bores me to bits most of the time. I think drawing the objects/people/settings and writing dialogue could be more interesting. I like experimenting with methods of story-telling. I tried my hand at writing scripts once too (didn't like that).

Third... Who put an age limit on trying new things? (And 24 is not that old!) Besides, I want to try to discover/rediscover the artist in me. I took every art class my high school had to offer. I used to paint and sculpt too. I wasn't good at it, but it was fun. (IMO, It's perfectly okay to do things you enjoy, even if you're no good at them.)

NO ONE is too old to start art :D

usedbooks
First... I'm a woman. ;)

Second... Writing descriptions bores me to bits most of the time. I think drawing the objects/people/settings and writing dialogue could be more interesting. I like experimenting with methods of story-telling. I tried my hand at writing scripts once too (didn't like that).

wow interesting, descriptions are always my favorite part of writing!! which is kind of unfortunate, because I don't get to use that skill with my comic... so I have to stick with dialogue, which I'm not terribly great at. (you see, all throughout high school and even a little into college, I wanted to be a writer, not an artist. but then I took a painting class, magically got better at art, and discovered that rather than just "liking art a lot", art is like.... crystal meth without the bad side-effects.

I think your art's great though, and you're improving! better late than never!!

oh, and regarding the mistaken gender: your characters are a little on the androgynous side, you know, so it wouldn't be too hard to believe seiko is a boy (from just a headshot) and it's funny, but people tend to imagine you looking like your avatar!
(admit it, you think I'm a hot anime guy who looks like a girl, with red hair and a bleeding neck!)

Kristen Gudsnuk
oh, and regarding the mistaken gender: your characters are a little on the androgynous side, you know, so it wouldn't be too hard to believe seiko is a boy (from just a headshot

In my first sketches, she turned out identical to my brother. o_O Perfectly acceptable mistake.

I love dialogue. I use a lot of it in my writing. I love writing a good description, but it takes time and, um, thought. I liked it more when I was younger. These days I mostly care about how characters are thinking and interacting -- at least for most of my stories. *Has a backlog of unfinished novels.*

usedbooks
I love dialogue. I use a lot of it in my writing. I love writing a good description, but it takes time and, um, thought. I liked it more when I was younger. These days I mostly care about how characters are thinking and interacting -- at least for most of my stories. *Has a backlog of unfinished novels.*

funny, for me dialogue takes more work... haha idk why. maybe because characters' interactions and stuff is like a logic puzzle... you have to figure out who they are, why they are, and THEN you can know how they are. AND with dialogue you have to worry about using different voices for the characters. Like let's say there's a very emo teenager who fancies that he's just like the narrator in the book "the perks of being a wallflower"; well then he'd probably say the word 'incidentally' a lot, etc etc. and it's hard for me to keep all those things in mind when I write.
whereas descriptions can be whatever you want them to be. That house can be blue, it can be grey, it can be charming, decrepit, Dickensian, whatever! it's liberating!

so, have you ever finished a novel? not meant in a rude way of course, I'm just curious ^_^

Continuing thread hi-jacking...

Dialogue always flows naturally for me. I was really into acting in middle school, so getting into a role is something I enjoy immensely. ("What should the psychotic killer say? No problem, I just have to crawl into him mind a moment." )

Kristen Gudsnuk
so, have you ever finished a novel? not meant in a rude way of course, I'm just curious ^_^

Not an original full >100 page one, no. I've been working on a space drama/adventure off and on since I was 15 (nine years... I'm OOOOOOLD). It's first persom from the view of a very depressing teenage girl, so I have to be in a mood to add to it... Way too much description and not enough interaction/dialogue. My current project "Strange Creatures" was started on tax day last year. It's all about the characters, so I guess more fitting for the current "me."

I wrote something similar to fanfiction for that old Nick show "The Tomorrow People," just using the skills and setting -- my own cast. (Can't help it; I love making characters!) I filled up about 500 notebook pages with "episodes."

I also finished a couple of novellas. About 40 pages each. One was an adventure involving a team of archaeologists looking for a treasure (something related to Atlantis, I think). Pretty exciting, involved a little romance and a serious betrayal (spy-in-our-midst sort of thing). The other was a murder mystery involving a first meeting between email penpals (that was actually another mystery within the plot) and taking place on a smallish boat (8 cabins). The latter was all on notebook paper, and I have no idea where it went. I jotted stories on anything handy to get through the boredom that was high school. I finished those only because I had a "fan" who would not allow me to leave him hanging.

I have some good short stories, but all written as class assignments. One took a prize in a state level competition, remaining my single greatest accomplishment in life. (That's so pathetic...) Short stories are HARD to write for me, too limiting. I think I hate for things to end.

Too many plotlines in my brain.

hehe we're totally threadjacking... oh wells...

wow that sounds really cool though!!! I actually already read part of Strange Creatures (it was in the writing forum) and it was pretty cool!
that's cool that you can use your acting experience to help you write, too-- I think I kind of do that when I draw!!! like, if I'm drawing a really angry face, I'll look angry.. or if I'm drawing a crazy chibi face I'll be like, "gee why does my face hurt?" XD! but that's good that you can, shall I say, improv like that. ^^
I'm not much of a short story person either because I feel like it's harder to get a character across in such a short amount of time, and that's always the main goal of writing for me, rather than having anything actually happen (yes how post-modern of me! and they're all bleak Everyman characters living in the shattered suburban american dream! take that, raymond carver!! heh)
I've only finished 4 not-for-class stories though... ever. but they were all really long. one of them was actually not-bad, and I got a scholarship for it!! yay! my sister didn't like it though... ;_;!! she's teh devil!!