Were you born with it, when your mom gave you your first crayon or paper?
Personally when i found Penny Arcade, Gabe's art just inspired me to draw, previously i would never of thought to draw or do art but now its grown on me.
And you.....?

I honestly don't know. It just sort of clicked when I was around fifteen or sixteen. Before that I was good at science and English and maths, then one day I suddenly got shit at anything intellectual and picked up a pencil instead.

Pretty games and arts were indeed pretty.

When I was little, I did a lot of reading, daydreaming, creating stories in my head. (Or coming up with shows/movies with my brother.) I started putting them on paper or in word processors when it was less acceptable to be running around talking to myself. -- Plus, school was just mind-numbingly boring. I always got my work done long before everyone else, so I needed something to fill the time.

Always wanted to be an artist. Consistently immitating what I saw in the Sunday comics or my GoldKey comic books. It was my sense of solace when other kids didn't understand me. My mother told me the first bit of art I she saw me actually try to do was a picture of the family dog at age 3. 30 years later, still going strong. :)

I've been drawing and telling stories for as long as I can remember. I was one of those kids who narrated their own life out loud when I was little, and there wasn't a scrap of paper in the entire house that I hadn't scribbled on at least once.

It just grew from there, I suppose.

The desire to show off motivated me.

The writing, started as far back as age 7 (for all I can remember). Not too sure exactly what inspired me. From what I remember, stuff just keeps rushing into my head. Sometimes they just rush in, sometimes they are triggered. Triggered by anything from life events to things I saw on TV or read.

The drawing came at a later date. I started drawing because of my exposure to anime and manga.

I also had the desire to connect the dots between the written word to the visual image. Otherwise I'd be having someone else to draw my comics. As was suggested a long time ago to me by one of my readers. Because my art quality isnt at par with the story quality. But I'm like... nah I'd do it myself. lol

I'm not sure what gave the first push, but today i get most of my inspiration from music, nature and so on.... whatever gives me a sertain mood, feeling, vision....

Now this is a story, all about how my life got flipped - turned upside down
How I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air-

...I'm j/k jeez >.>


When I was 7 I started copying the pokemanz pictures, I had a real knack at it.
And i realized in grade school that all my art projects were mysteriously better/completed faster than the other kids and i got praised for it- so i kept it up throughout the young years.
So basically Aqua's reason.

wow.

I just enjoyed drawing. That's all there is to it. I LIKED it ^_^
The more you do something, the better you get. If you then get encouragement, even better.

Believe it or not, I started doing writing a story when I was in the 4th grade. You figure I was about 10 years old then. It was called "Todd Toast and Chad Cheese".

Back then, all I really did was play videogames. So back then, that's all that really inspired me.

Then, just two years later *actually 3, but who's counting? XD* I started getting really into the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, picked up a pencil, a piece of lined paper, and kept drawing them. And changing it bit by bit.

And that's how I started.

At first I simply liked drawing. I seemed to be pretty good at it all through elementary school. Or so people said. I also won all the artistic contests (for drawing) we had.

I started making comics due to my love of TMNTurtles. My comic had "original" characters but everything was pretty much just a TMNT rip off. Then I did a Ren & Stimpy rip off.
I started wanting to make a story more original so I came up with character designs by looking at various games and anime I was watching (1995 weee) and came up with a few cast members. Amalgams of various things I had seen pretty much.

I started making my own story. After that the story became more important. I kept trying to make it more unique. Or throw in more things I enjoyed.

Sadly this took over for a while and I stopped drawing much. It didn't help that scanning and coloring was so difficult. And for some reason it never occurred to me to try coloring any other way (aside from color pencils that I had done beforehand)
So I got discouraged and stopped drawing for around 2001-2006.

The biggest inspirations now are the digital means I have to draw. The cintiq costed a lot so I was GOING TO DRAW. And I discovered a newer even more powerful inspiration. Everyone's feedback. Especially constructive criticism. I try to look at that as a challenge for myself. Makes the task more fun.

/TL;DR session

Skullbie
When I was 7 I started copying the pokemanz pictures

Wow, I feel old now. Doesn't seem like Pokemon is that old. I didn't hear about them till after I was out of high school >_<

I started drawing comics before I knew how to write the words that went into text balloons. I started drawing comics before my parents even realized I could read (I taught myself how to read by watching TV with the hearing-impaired text on).

I kept badgering my auntie to write the words for me (she was a high schooler), until she got tired of me running into her room every 5 minutes (LOL I just couldn't understand why she hated having me running into her room and touching all her stuff), and made the ingenious suggestion that I replace the words in the balloons with little dots instead. Freed from the need to write words, my drawing speed went 10x faster. That's what kept me on drawing comics; otherwise I might have gotten frustrated and just drew wordless poster art instead.

Edit: LOL I think I broke the tuning knob off her radio... cuz she wasn't in her room, so I kept turning the dial to the right... and to the right... and to the right.. until the thing just fell off heeheeheehee...

When I was thirteen, my mom gave me an old copy of "The Lurking Fear and Other Weird Tales" by H.P. Lovecraft. After reading The Call of Cthulhu, I started scouring bookstores, libraries, and online resources for years. By the time I was seventeen, Lovecraft's influence, combined with this horrible series nightmares I was having at the time inspired me to write my first story. After that, I just couldn't stop.

I just wanted to show off and be funny. Not a lot of depth there.

I have the same reason as you. VgCats and Slackerz helped too.

I was always drawing, my first drawings were these weird potato people. Then when I was about five, I started writing and drawing stories in a "children's book" format. That's basically where my desire to combine words and pictures began. Calvin and Hobbes really cemented comics into my mind, though. I drew my first major "book" in the fourth grade. It was 170 pages of pure nonsense, and it was all about my pet guinea pig. I haven't been able to separate guinea pigs and comics since.

I remember drawing cards for my sick grandmother( she pulled through thankfully) when I was 7. But becoming a comic artist didn't come to my mind at all. I wanted to be a astronaut, a digimon, even a arcologist. Then at the age of 12, I started to watch a lot of anime and then I wanted( And still do) to be a Animator/Voice actor. I decided to go to art class in middle school and I suddenly can make a sketch for a freind in 5 minutes flat. Then when I flipped through a drawing book and saw ' how to make Cartoon character' I was hooked.

When I was little I always loved drawing and would go into hysterics if anyone messed with my drawings. I was always considered to be the best drawer in my class ever since kindergarten. I have always loved to come up with stories as well. I won first place in this school program for my short stories 3 years in a row from 1-3rd grade (until they stopped having the program) I tried to right several books but they didn't turn out the way I had hoped so I combined my anime/manga passion with my writing passion with my drawing passion and here I am on DD...
I'm not saying I am even that good at drawing or writing at all. Just saying how I grew up doing it.
: ]

Well, I'm a writer at heart, not an artist (Should come through in my drawings). But I've always sketched here and there and the drawings I now turn into my comics are pictures that I know are of very little quality, but suit their purpose.

I'm lucky enough to be able to draw ENOUGH for my means, I suppose.

SUPERHEROS! It's all down to superheros... though I guess my dad being a painter probably had something to do with it.

I still need fresh inspiration to draw stuff, otherwise I'll just stop. Since I went off superheros my drawing levels have decreased big time.

I watched too much TV as a child, so Sailor Moon ,DBZ, Spider-man, and Ninja Turtles gave me inspiration to start drawing. I even made terrible spin-off characters from those cartoons. I just kept going from then on out. :P

usedbooks
When I was little, I did a lot of reading, daydreaming, creating stories in my head. (Or coming up with shows/movies with my brother.) I started putting them on paper or in word processors when it was less acceptable to be running around talking to myself. -- Plus, school was just mind-numbingly boring. I always got my work done long before everyone else, so I needed something to fill the time.

Pretty much the same here, only I still run around talking to myself when nobody's nearby.

Disney's Bambi got me started. lol. I remember for a whole year, I'd draw at least ten deer a day. -_-; Writing...? I've been writing for as long as I remember. But it was the creative writing classes i took in my college that really got me started. :)

I have actually learnt to read so that I could read comics :D
I don't know when I started to draw, but if my memory of old conversations between my parents and various guests serves me right... I started around 2 years old.

Was drawing "silent" stick figure comics until I have turned 6 or so, when I started to incorporate text. Did my own Turtles (at least three different versions across the years), Transformers (that visually had more to do with Challenge of the Gobots), Spider-Man (sort of negative spidey as I liked the black costume but couldn't draw it, so I gave him a white suit and black spider logo)... and at the same time I have pumped out possibly a thousand pages of my own original comics, sadly most of that landed in trash before I turned 15 :(

... one book has survived though :D

Wait, what was the question again? :)

Oh yeah. Well, that covers the art, I just always loved to draw and since I loved comics and telling stories it seemed like a logical step. As for writing, I have started writing short stories around 13 and shifted to that format almost entirely when I hit 15 and did so until 2003 or 2004, when I wrote my novel... that made me think that I should make it a graphic novel instead, and thus switch my interest again.

PC upgrade, cheap used scanner, cheap volito2 wacom tablet, cheap (old and used) photoshop 7 = return to art through digital means, and finally return to comics February 2008. I actually returned a bit earlier with writing scripts in mind, but I had difficulties finding artists, so I ended up relearning how to draw.

Great, now I wrote an ultralong post that everyone will skip ;D

i always wanted to be an artist for a comic book. like draw batman or something. then i relized i am a horrible horrible artist and will never ever suceed in that field.

luckily for me i've been writing stories since grade three :D so now i just wanna write. beacuse i find it more fun..... and easier. and no one understands why :D

Always liked anime and manga. Always wanted my own. Lol supose thats about it. left school last years spent a year in a games development course and decided screw it im going back to what im good at. Also stole a copy of flash from them but what are they gonna do about it now?

I had drawn some when I was little, but it wasn't until Jr. High that I got really jealous of a friend of mine's ability to make pretty art, so I started drawing to try and surpass her. I didn't, but I discovered I really liked drawing for my own enjoyment and started bettering myself for myself.

Writing? I have always loved writing. I used to read fantasy books all the time when I was kid, and I wanted to write my own. I eventually went from fantasy to ridiculous mafia and pyro stories though :3

My comic on DD is the first time I've merged my Writing and Drawing. Usually I keep my story characters and drawing characters exclusive from one another.

I've been drawing for as long I can remember.My mom taught me whn I was really little and I just kept learning.