How did you get here?

[redmancomics]

For me it's just been a life-long hobby. Not exactly sure how it started.
My preferred style is cartoon-ey as well.

[Cavechan]

I started taking art classes and drawing/painting around fourth grade. Around 7th grade is when I started watching anime like Pokemon, Digimon, Sailor Moon, DBZ, etc and started getting into drawing anime-style. And that's what I've always done since! About 20 years later now...

[vothnthorvaldson]

Also long-life hobby.

When I was a kid I wanted to be a scientist, but the old-times one who did everything from botany to zoology and chemistry etc.. So I was mostly drawing animals and plants, from life or books.
Unfortunately, I had to become a present time scientist, but that did not stop the drawing, only, I started to draw from microscope slides (both for work and as a hobby. You can't imagine how much time one can lose by buying a simple x2000 microscope).

I also always drew things from my imagination, (mostly fantasy creatures, but often in a strong realistic evolutionary angle) but never had the desire to actually work on a actual project until very recently. My current comic has the first humans I ever designed, and almost the firsts I ever drew. Ouch. I like the challenge but will be happy when the time comes to draw some fantasy creatures and plants, so I'll say semi-realistic flora and fauna is what I like drawing best.

[Rodimus13]

Hubby started drawing in Kinder, when his art teacher encouraged him and told him how he was doing so well. She really inspired him. By Middle School he knew he wanted to be a professional artist. After becoming a graphic designer, he has started his next goal... becoming a professional comic artist. Once we pay off some debts we might be able to afford him quitting his current job and going full time on this.

[akemikae]

I've drawn pretty much my whole life and I've always enjoyed telling stories, so much so that I even wrote 130 page book at the age of 11. (It's pretty bad, but still, it's there). Never really knew what I'd do with the combination of loving to tell stories and drawing, till about 3 years ago.

"I'm going to start a comic." I proclaimed to my friend one day, while attempting to draw for the first time in months. Days later I started to draw pages on paper, then received a cheap tablet from my husband a few months later.

Here I am a few years later, with about 5k followers (combined through multiple platforms) It really is crazy how inspiration works sometimes, isn't it?
...
Also my preferred style is anime/manga. Though, I'd like to think that my art style is still fairly unique to myself.

[unknown_user]

It always was a constant desire for me both to draw and to write.

---

My parents said that I've learned to hold pensil and made attempts to draw even before I learned to talk (but I've learned to talk later than most of children). According to them, most of my early drawings were about cats, who swing on the swings - at least, in cases when they could understand them at all. And they wondered, why I drew such a things again and again so many times. But I don't remember this myself exactly (I suppose that it was just because I liked swings and cats?..).
I've learned to write in maybe 5 years or so and try to guess what I started to do? Of course, write stories.
One day when I already was adult, I've found my diary which I've used when I was between 5 and 6. It contained a lot of stories, despite I wasn't even able to write well those times. All letters in this diary were capital and most of them were shaked, misformed and very ugly. Sometimes I mixed up different letters and wrote mirroring or rotating or turning over versions of letters instead of normal ones. So these scribbles were hard to understand.
But I've spent some time decrypted them, and it appeared to be fun.
My favorite story from that diary (in approximate translation):
"There was a cocroach. He lived a short live and then died."
Of course, it was accompanied by the very ugly drawing of the cocroach.
I was such a freak for the whole life
So I can't just imagine living without doing something creative and freaky from time to time.

[vothnthorvaldson]

Love the cockroach story.

Signed, the one who used to sew tapeworm plush toys

[TopJimComics]

A friend introduced me to X-Men in high school, and then we discovered TMNT. Not the pizza loving turtles you know today, but the black and white gritty original comic. Seeing their work and seeing people read a comic from basically two nobodies was a huge inspiration for me.

[Velvero]

In my case it was boredom, my mother had to go on a business trip to another country for 6 months and decided to take me and my sister with her. My mom was overly protective so she didn't trust me to go outside the house while she was at work, my sister was several years younger than me and conversation with her wasn't really that interesting. I couldn't speak with many of the people in that lived in my house either, they didn't speak English and I only knew a few phrases from their language. Internet was also a rarity for me back then, we had a limited package to split equally amongst the several people living in that house and I used my share to talk to my friends back home. I was so bored that I started to do really dangerous stuff for the thrill of it but was scared off of doing that after a burned my finger while trying to light a fire in my backyard... So I calmed down and picked up drawing (given I wasn't very good at it).

[silverraven0]

It started when I was a child...

...

...

...And now I'm here.

(I don't know what to say actually. XD )

My ideas come from many way. From movies, from comics, from novels, from folktales or fairy tales, music... Etc.

And my main drawing style is actually manga style, but I can 'copy' other styles, sort of, though I rarely do it nowadays.

[Kann]

Preschool teacher told my parents that my drawings are nice and they encouraged me to draw more. xD

[wekanian]

Oh LOL at first I thought you were asking how do we get here on Tapas XD

I read manga a lot when I was a kid and see how cool it is to be able to draw your own story. And so I draw, not a lot, but quite enough for me to be able to start a comic. Also, story ideas pop randomly and demand to be drawn XD

[unknown_user]

I've also recalled one more funny thing from my 5-6-years diary
It contained primitive math examples, like "3 + 5 = 8", repeated for several times and surrounded by pictures, wonderments and admirations. Something like:
"3 + 5 = 8. 3 + 5 = 8 ?! REALLY!? OH YES YES YES, 3 + 5 = 8. But maybe 3 + 5 = 7? NO!!! IT IS WRONG! 3 + 5 = 8!!! OH YES, 3 + 5 = 8!!!" - all this is, of course, written in the very messy way and with a picture of flowers (?) and the happy person nearby.

[fattackycats]

Been artistically inclined since I was a toddler. Got serious about it in high school and started posting my work online right after I graduated. It's my dream to be self-employed and work as an illustrator and indie comic artist/publisher for a living. My favorite art style to draw in is a combo of anime and realism. I sorta combine elements of different art styles but there is definitely an anime influence.

[Kann]

I've never seen someone this happy about math. xD

[ben]

I’ve been drawing and writing for as long as I can remember. It only occurred to me after discovering manga that I could make comics that weren’t about superheroes.

For a while I was drawing very bad anime-style comics and then I started really seriously pursuing fine art and completely dropped comics and the anime style sort of lost its appeal to me. I started doing loose doodle-y comics for fun alongside my more serious still lifes and portraits and then someone asked if I wanted to publish my comics with them. They basically introduced me to more alternative and indie comics that grabbed my attention and I started focusing more on that. The person who brought me into it all is now my husband.

There is some anime influence in SOME of my work but it’s very influenced by a lotta things not just anime.

[sarrowsmith10]

I think I've always been drawing, ever since I was little. In high school I took Japanese, and our teacher would have us draw short little comics (stick figures mostly) to practice our kana and short conversations. I took some basic art classes in college to fill humanities credits, such as intro to oil painting, intro to illustration, scientific illustration, etc. Then after I graduated I married a comic-holic. He got me reading all kinds of stuff from Marvel/DC/DevilsDue/Image/etc. One of my coworkers was super duper into webcomics and we decided to do one together, since I had recently gotten into comics myself. And from that, our main epic comic Goblins of Razard was born!

[beta1042]

when I was growing up the internet was only just becoming a thing, and I had access to limited anime and stuff, no one I knew aside from my bro even liked it or talked about. But then when I got the internet I remember someone sharing a picture they drew and it was anime style and I immediately loved it and wanted to draw that style too. I think prior it just never registered in my mind to draw those things cause art class was always "here's an apple, draw the apple"

[scuddles]

all my earliest memories involve drawing. I was the firstborn of some teenage parents doing their own thing so I had and always have had an exorbitant amount of free time by myself. so not really a conscious decision as far as I can remember. I just did and always have.

edit: oh and as for style I don't really have a preference I just have moods I facilitate with different styles I guess.

[joannekwan]

I've been drawing since I was 4. I wanted to emulate the cartoons and shows I watched so I picked up a pencil.