'older' creators (25+) let's support each other!

adderfly 2021-07-06 00:34:30 UTC #1

There are so many amazing really young creators on here, and I admire so many of them and love seeing their work! But it feels a little lonely to be a tapas comic artist who isn't a college aged sometimes, so I want to meet other people who are feeling the same, and see their work! So tell me a little about yourself and your comic/novel journey, and drop a link! And maybe consider dropping a few subscribes while you scroll through this thread so that we can all grow together! (Also there was a really nice similar thread to this about a year ago when I first joined tapas so shout out to whoever did this the first time around.)

I'll go first! I'm a 31 year old artist/writer/teacher who has worked in many art forms but never successfully gotten a graphic novel/comic off the ground, until the quarantine hit. My comic is a fantasy coming of age story about a girl who lives on an island once populated by dragons and now overrun by giant flies!

https://tapas.io/series/Dragonwood

FafasMcMelt 2021-07-06 00:47:45 UTC #2

That's a nice prompt.

I just turned 27, and took the long, winded way, of being self taught, so I really took my time to improve. I've been drawing comics for myself ever since I was a little kid, but the first time I did something remotely of quality I was in college. Recently I got started with digital art, and although it has been a blast learning many new skills, I admit I do feel old and far behind everyone else

The comic I started back on college is The Ghoul, a dark fantasy monster feature. It was done mostly by hand, but I since scanned it and treated the pages on photoshop. Took me a few years to get it done, as I hit pretty much every bump on the road.

My new, ongoing, completely digital, comic is Classic Fantasy, a tongue in cheek action adventure that both celebrates and pokes fun at the tropes we see in fantasy, comics and story telling in general.

Looking forward to meeting fellow boomers.

Scarlet_Cryptid 2021-07-06 01:03:06 UTC #3

Yeah, it's nice to find other 'experienced' (aka 'older') artists.

I'm 38, been drawing since I was three, did art all throughout school and majored in it in college, and used to work at an art store. I even did a brief stint as an art teacher for kids' summer art camps. I've always written as a hobby and drawn huge amounts of art centering around anything I was interested in at the time... but ever since I was in college, I've always wanted to produce a comic. My post-graduation plan for a while was to get hired on at one of the local comic book studios... but going to my first comic book convention changed my mind. I still feel like that was a bullet dodged.

And then, for a handful of reasons that were more like excuses, I didn't start a comic for almost 15 years. I won't go into the extended edition about all of this, but the short version is, when 2020 hit, and everything locked down, I realized I was never going to have more free time than I currently had, and since my lifestyle hadn't actually changed that much (hello fellow introverts...), there was never going to be a more convenient time to finally try.

So I did. I started drawing pages in October of 2020, built up a 30-page buffer, and started posting in April. I've never simultaneously felt so terrified and also so relieved. I've only got 35 subscribers so far, which is fair since it's only been a few months, but I like what I've got so far.

crowstories 2021-07-06 02:24:28 UTC #4

I'm 35, and though I've been writing and drawing for most of my life, the pandemic was what finally motivated me (like many others) to sit down and actually write a novel/try my hand at making comics/decide a comic was more work than I have time for/start writing a second novel (this time with illustrations), instead.

I'm still fairly new to digital art, and have a sort of horror of drawing humans, so there have definitely been challenges, and I also feel like I'm pretty far behind where my art is concerned, but we all have to start somewhere, and I've already seen a lot of improvement.

I'll definitely be checking out some of y'all's work!

This is my current project:

Eiranyx 2021-07-06 02:39:41 UTC #5

Yay fellow older creators~
I'm turning 26 this august. I work as a business owner and an artist on the side-- I do murals, paintings and graphics as well since it's one of my majors during college.
It's my first time venturing in the world of webtoon/webcomic making since I used to do single pieces most of the time and haven't tried to make an actual comic aside from my college project before. So when the pandemic started, I was able to have time to learn and was able to focus on it. My comic is actually dark fantasy, mixed with BL.
My work is heavily inspired by korean manhua's and japanese mangas that I read. And I decided to make my own comic to improve my drawing skills, learning paneling and story execution.
I'm still grasping everything I need to know in making a webtoon but I could say pretty much I learned the basics and a little on how the industry works based on my current experiences ^^

crowkidart 2021-07-06 02:48:27 UTC #6

Hi I'm 27! I currently work both in animation (doing layouts) and game (doing concept art). My dream is to live off of my own creations someday, but I've also struggled with anxiety and general lack of confidence most of my life, so it's only now at 26/27 that I managed to start publishing a comic of my own.

And you know what? It's far from perfect, but I'm happy to be able to put it out there and for the first time I don't feel like giving up at all
This one is a BL comic, and I guess my work revolves a lot more on being fun than being deep. But there are a few things which I'm very passionate about, for instance I do my best to make my characters look and feel human, because I think there's a lot of beauty in real bodies and minds etc.

Shadymeadows 2021-07-06 02:49:48 UTC #7

This nonbinary person doesn't like to reveal their age but yes I meet the criteria + some. Nice to meet you! I work as a graphic designer for my day job and have a 9 year old. I work on my Vampire - Fantasy - Bl comic as much as I can for having a full life.

ivanskilling 2021-07-06 02:54:19 UTC #8

I just turned 29 years old this month! Inching closer to the big 3.
I started my writing journey in 2015 with fanfiction and slowly moved to original stories starting in 2017. I've had fun writing many short and long stories in different genres - ranging from scifi, thriller, action to romance, comedy, and drama. My main site was deviantArt at the time but I was looking to move away from there. I heard about Tapas in 2019 and have been happy to make it my home since then!

I still delve in multiple genres, so my novels on Tapas are from the drama, romance, and scifi genre respectively.

ninjashira 2021-07-06 02:58:35 UTC #9

Hey y'all!

I do love that there are so many talented and motivated young creators, I think it's amazing that so many people want to create comics, but it can be a little hard to relate sometimes! I'm 33 years old, and I'm actually a late-in-life college student studying Sequential Art at SCAD.

I've always loved comics, and I've been drawing comics of some kind for nearly twenty years, but only recently taking active and deliberate steps to work towards making comics my career. I turned 30 and was offered a big office promotion when I had the realization that, if I took that promotion, I would be stuck in that job for the rest of my life, and I would never draw comics. So after talking it over with my husband (and accidentally being stranded in Savannah on our honeymoon), we decided to turn our lives upside-down and move across the country so I could go to college for comics.

My Big Plan is to get my Master's in Sequential Art after I finish my BFA so I can teach at the college level and share my knowledge and love of comics as an art form with the next generation of up-and-coming young artists.

My comic Hollow is about a former magical anime hero who is trying to move on with a normal life after sealing away the last of the magic. It plays on a lot of themes about nostalgia and growing up and being expected to leave your naive childhood fancies behind.

Kaydreamer 2021-07-06 02:58:44 UTC #10

I'm also 31! I've been drawing as a hobby since I got into anime at around 13, but my biggest passion was always music. When it came to choosing what to study at university, I never really considered art. I was okay at it, but I found drawing from life dull back then, and I knew I didn't have the drive there to meet the demands of an art degree. But I definitely had the drive for music, so I wound up going into a bachelor of performance, then followed that up with a graduate diploma in teaching.

I never stopped drawing, though. It was always something I enjoyed in my spare time, and I continually got better as I started sprinkling in a bit more life drawing here and there. A few years back, I felt myself really starting to tire of being a classroom music teacher, and that coincided with me getting an iPad Pro and experiencing one of the biggest bursts of passion and improvement in my art I'd ever had. I decided that I'd cut my teaching down to just teaching singing two days per week, enough to pay the bills, and try to shift gears into an artistic career. After a moorless 9 months of trying to figure out what to specialise in, I found a perfect fit with comics, and started making Blue Star Rebellion as a way to hone that craft.

Ideally, I'd love to continue working on my own stories forever - I'm pretty happy with the working balance I have now, even though money can be tight. My plan was originally to use the best pages from Blue Star Rebellion as portfolio pieces, and get illustration work from publishing houses, but I've since found out that there's nothing else like telling your own story and having people love it, and I'd love to keep doing that.

LettieK 2021-07-06 03:02:45 UTC #11

I love this thread! I'm 32 and currently working on my very first novel. I have a degree in education with an emphasis on English/Literature. I was only an avid reader (especially of fantasy works), and never thought to write my own stories. After being inspired by so many talented writers in the serialized story format, I decided to go for it!

Writing this story had actually become very therapeutic for me in unexpected ways: being in control of a story, the characters and events has been so freeing. It's cliché, but my heart is in this story.

Don't worry about subscribing unless you're a fan of mature, BL dark romance.

Kuma 2021-07-06 03:10:40 UTC #12

I'm a 30 year old Videogame Writer from Argenina who writes on his free time. I've been writing profesional for roughly 10 years and I have some published work in Dynamite Entertaiment. My hobbies include cooking and practicing pro-wrestling in the local indie scene in my country.

My novel is Centris, a flat-out Fantasy Novel (No isekai, no systems, no reincarnations) set in a Kingdom split between two factions of nobles attempting to steer the future of the country alongside their own ideals.

Kuma 2021-07-06 03:21:48 UTC #13

Did you change the cover? It looks dope

LettieK 2021-07-06 03:26:23 UTC #14

@Kuma I did! I like it so much better- thank you!

KayeJewett 2021-07-06 03:34:13 UTC #15

34-year-old commercial driver from the Midwest here. I'm a former security guard and have a bachelors degree in CSI that's currently rotting on the shelf.

I can draw in anime style, buuuuut ... I can't even begin to figure out comic layout and whatnot. So when I make art, I add illustrations to my novels instead. My art is self-taught and decent, but I've been writing since I was ten, so that's how I prefer to tell my stories.

I'm working on a fantasy series, with the first book centered around a vampire and a hunter who begrudgingly join forces to take down a much worse vampire. The second book just released with chapter one today, and this one's more of a drama than the LGBTQ romance at the heart of the first installment.

To anyone who wants to read - start with book one. Book two will make much more sense that way.

LittleFoodie 2021-07-06 03:38:58 UTC #16

I’m 27 and am an auditor who is sometimes really stressed out after looking at financial and IT documents all the time and needed an outlet to release my creative side. No big aspirations or anything I just really enjoyed Villainess stories and wanted to write one of my own. I found out that creative writing is way more complicated than a business report, and I need lots of practice haha.

LettieK 2021-07-06 03:39:51 UTC #17

I'm from the Midwest too! I love a good vampire story- I'll have to check it out!

IamKeeks 2021-07-06 03:54:02 UTC #18

I'm 32 years old. I work in Nagoya, Japan as an assistant English teacher. I've been drawing forever and time passes, I've come to grips with my mortality and the fact that (while I enjoy it) I don't want to do this job for the rest of my life.
I've been coming up with ideas for stories since high-school. The job in Nagoya doesn't require a much of my time as the other cities I've worked in, so I figured, it's now or never. "Our Sanctuary" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the world in my head, but I think it's not half bad.

I'm still catching up on my reading, but I'll be sure to get to all of your works.

kitschensyngk 2021-07-06 04:01:40 UTC #19

Damn kids today with their Instabooks and their Facegrams and their thirty-one flavors of Coke!

90's kid over here. Here's what I get up to:

UrMom 2021-07-06 04:30:26 UTC #20

I'm not comfortable revealing my exact age, but I'm definitely over 25. Was in the military for 6 years (Joined due to a lack of civilian employers willing to hire me.), quit due to moving too far out of town to be able to make the commute, now I'm training to work in a dental billing job. I've been drawing for as long as I can remember, although I really took it on a serious hobby when I turned 11, been casually educating myself on it since. I have trouble with verbal communication so drawing was always my way of expressing thoughts and emotions, never had much of an interest in going to school for it since I don't want the one thing I've consistently enjoyed to turn into a job. Drawing is essentially my tool for venting, and helps give me something to focus on, so I hold a lot of personal value in being able to do it.

Other than that my major interests are in different sciences and such. I do a lot of casual research on pathology, biology, necropsy, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, geology and astronomy. Really, my comic is just an excuse to dig deeper into some of that stuff. I'm also a huge fan of horror and exploring disturbing media, been a fan of the former for about as long as I've been drawing thanks to my dad showed a horror movie to me when I was 3, I've always had an interest in it slice... hmmm... Oh yeah! Really weak for musicals, love that shit! Doesn't matter how terrible is, the high energy and/or songs always gets me pumped. Speaking of musicals, big music person, I'll listen to anything except modern country and I've collected about 9k songs on my computer since high school. I also somewhat know how to play the viola and piano thanks to lessons I had as a child, and can read sheet music.

When it comes to comics, I didn't get into reading them till I was 14, and only got into drawing them at about 20 because I didn't know how to animation. It wasn't my medium of choice, but I've gotten really into it with my current project, it gives me a way to explore and express emotions that I can't with illustration.

I'll drop my comic, but I don't recommend anyone checking it out if they're under the age of 17 (I'm sure kids are reading this thread.), and if you are not a fan of heavier topics like mental illness, abuse and trauma. This is very much a niche, uncomfortable comic that will probably come off as torture/tragedy porn to many.