Hello! It's been a while since I set up this website, and I am long overdue for writing a proper introduction.
The short version: I am an adult who has been drawing for most of my life. I do not have much formal art training, and I do art mainly as a hobby. Recently, I've discovered my love for watercolor and am exploring how far I can push my skills in this medium.
The long version...
My first introduction to the online art community was over 15 years ago, during the heyday of Deviantart. I can only speak from my own limited experience, but its popularity was such that everyone in my school friend group had an account and would use it to share their anime OCs/roleplay/blog about whatever was going on in their life. I never got into roleplaying myself, but I signed up and started posting scribbly drawings and making incomprehensible blog posts with a truly astonishing amount of capslock and XD's.
Back in those days, I was obsessed with Pokemon, and I found one character that I really liked to draw and proceeded to dash out dozens, if not hundreds, of pictures of them. (The more things change...) Mercifully, the people on Deviantart didn't drive me off the site for spamming them with literal child's scrawl, and I got a few likes, comments, and followers. I got to see the works of many talented artists from around the world and learned what I could aspire to. One of my favorite pastimes at this age was trawling through Japanese indie artists' websites and saving every picture that I liked off of them. Sadly, they were not stored properly and have since been lost to the digital sands of time.
At this time, my tools of choice were a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet (I still remember the day my parents took me to the store to get it!), Corel Painter, and a very old copy of Photoshop. Later, I would switch to Paint Tool SAI (shoutout to the one dude in Japan who is maintaining it, would buy again), which would go on to become my go-to drawing software. I have yet to find anything that rivals its lightweight simplicity: it used to run comfortably on a Windows Vista-era laptop with a whopping 4 GB of RAM.
I also began attending anime conventions at this time, much to the chagrin of my parents. I still remember the first artist alley I ever saw - it was tiny, hosted in a hotel, literally booths in a hallway - but I was blown away by the talent on display. From that moment on, I knew that I wanted to be the person on the other side of the table some day. But first, my art had to improve.
Deviantart began its initial decline around the early 2010s, and I followed the wave of migration to Tumblr. I made some slightly less incomprehensible blog posts, and I shared fanart of various anime. As Tumblr continued to increase in popularity, I was swept up in one of its big fandoms. I will not say exactly what my niche was, but I ran a moderately popular art blog at one point. Thankfully, it never got big enough to get me entangled in drama, so it was an overall pleasant experience. I took my online success to mean that I was 'good enough' to try applying to an artist alley, so I did... and somehow got accepted (it was not nearly as competitive back then as it is now).
My art skill was, in my opinion, woefully inadequate for artist alley. I also had no idea how to plan for running a booth, and ended up losing money on the whole endeavor. It could have been worse - this was still back in the day when the main offerings were prints, buttons, and handmade keychains, so I didn't sink that much money into production. However, people did kindly buy some buttons from me, so this is not to put down the art that they purchased. It was the best I could do at that time, and I'm grateful for their support.
Now painfully aware of the shortcomings of my own art, but unable to identify exactly what needed to be improved, I headed off to college to major in a STEM field at the behest of my parents. This would kick off a nearly decade-long period of artistic stagnation, although I made a valiant effort to try and improve by doing 'gesture drawings' regularly. (As I have since learned, quantity cannot compensate for a lack of intentionality in practice.)
This brings us to today. What broke me out of this period of stagnation were two discoveries: one, that I liked using watercolor, and two, that I really really wanted to draw fanart of the popular video game I'd been dabbling in. With watercolor, I could actually make cohesive drawings that looked 'finished'. Armed with determination and a new medium to conquer, I set out... and my art skill suddenly took off as well.
Am I ready for artist alley again? Skill-wise, I feel I have finally passed some threshold of 'barely acceptable'. But the landscape of artist alley has changed drastically since I sat at that humble table in the back of the hall over 10 years ago. Now, there is a plethora of high-quality merchandise that can be made to order, if you have the capital to invest; the cost of simply renting a table can be as much as $1000USD and continues to rise; and the application process is as competitive as applying to a top tier university. The threshold for actually turning a profit - or just breaking even - now seems impossibly high. If I do attempt to get into an artist alley again, it would be for the chance to meet and connect with other artists, not to make money.
Although my ability to engage with it has waxed and waned, art, and the desire to get better at it, has continued to guide and shape who I am to this day. Despite working in STEM, I value the arts highly and feel they are a crucial part of what makes us human. Nearly all of the friends I started this journey with have drifted away, and none pursue art as a main hobby any more. This is why I continue to post online, even if I now risk being drowned out by the deluge of AI-generated spam. Whatever form the internet takes in the coming years, I hope this little website can persist as a repository of human-made paintings for others to enjoy.
Thank you if you actually read this far - it ended up a lot longer than I expected! Here's to another many years of sharing our art...