I do like these ask artist games. So have these two questions I guess.
🖱️ What was your first art platform? (deviantart?pixiv?some niche art forum that has been dead?) What was your art journey before coming to cohost?
🎈 Do you have any favorite childhood drawing you'd like to share? Or, do you have any favorite art when you first started?
My first art platform was deviantART! I joined in 2006 and my first post was me very poorly tracing Cloud Strife from a bad dvdrip of Advent Children. (That art is gone, you will never see it and neither will I because it's absolutely on some HDD in a landfill somewhere now.)
Some art from when I first started/art journey stuff is kind of all over the place because I did a lot of design stuff before I ever did character/environment art. I started drawing some of that in my early 20s but I didn't really take it any kind of seriously until I graduated college. So here's some stuff sporadically from that time.
This gets really long so I'll put all this stuff below the jump
I learned digital art by doing bad photoshops in middle school.
and stamps, of course.
Eventually I got my first computer (an iMac G5), got online, and started making forum sigs. A lot of these seem to unfortunately be lost to time since I saved them on Photobucket. The ones I have saved on a drive are much nicer than my earliest attempts...
I used to mock-up my own game menus and made a PS3 theme based on some very very old characters of mine. I was pretty into StepMania at the time, too, so I'd design pack banners and BGs for friends (and my own charts).
All that design practise and energy would eventually go into making my own banners and stuff for my personal GOTY lists on Giant Bomb (like, on my personal blog. this was long before i'd get the privilege to guest-write them for the site!). Some of this stuff I'm still deeply proud of.
And I'd, of course, take part in the annual E3 banner challenge. It was a thing I looked forward to every year.
Past that, we kind of catch up to modern day me. There's a lot of older stuff that's not worth sharing. Some of my earliest attempts at digital art are bad and not in a fun-to-look back on kind of way. I have an art meme from way back saved, though, so you can at least get to see where I actually genuinely really very first started.
It's been fun to revisit some of this stuff. I'm realizing that even back then, a lot of what I did mixed illustration with graphic design in a way that sure informed the kinda stuff I do now. I can't post any of it because it's all deadname/past me stuff but I used to draw myself into album covers which forced me to re-draw those album covers entirely and it taught me a lot about design, too.
I get asked a lot about how I learned those skills and looking back on that path now it's pretty crazy to see that it was all basically self-taught and mostly informed from like... rhythm games, game UI, and the music I listened to at the time.
I really do think that the best thing you can do to learn a whole new discipline is just to try and recreate the stuff that inspires you. You'll never get it exactly right and that's kind of the point? Nothing I ever did with that stuff looked perfect but it taught me the weird sixth-sense you kinda need for graphic design, and layered a vision I feel is pretty unique to myself on top of it.