Why do I do this?
Well, the answer that you probably want (and is fortunately true) is that I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid, and dragons were always on my mind. Fast-forward to a few years back and a friend of mine suggests that I draw Juggernaut (from X-Men) riding a dragon, because he’s one of my favorite characters, and my friend figured it would be “two of your favorite things.”
So I sat down and worked on it and realized that I had gotten rusty. You see, before I went to college, drawing had been a thing I did for the sheer joy of doing it. I was That Kid Who Drew on Stuff and sometimes got into trouble because of it, but I didn’t care, I needed to draw.
While I was in art school, however, drawing became WORK– I was only drawing/painting or otherwise creating when someone was paying me to do it, or when I felt I needed to update my portfolio (in the hopes of getting paid to create). And at that point, I hadn’t been doing much Art for Money, so I had gotten really, really rusty.
So my thought process at that point was something like this:
- I should be drawing every day, so this doesn’t ever happen again.
- …maybe this would be easier if I had a theme or something.
- I’ll do a dragon every day; that sounds cool.
And the rest, as they say, is history. There are a few things that keep me going every day; although to an extent, part of me doing it every day sometimes is just me not wanting to break “the streak” out of laziness.
There have been a few times where I’ve missed doing a sketch due to exhaustion or stress or whathaveyou, and one day where I purposefully took the day off, but as of this writing (November 2013), it’s probably been less than 8 days missed total. Sometimes, the exploring of an idea or theme keeps me drawing, or I can pull inspiration from something I see/hear/encounter- you might notice that there’s a fair number of posts tagged “gaming,” if you pay attention to the tag index, and the “personal” category is pretty big, too.
And yes, I do take requests.