When I was in high school art class, I think it was Grade 11, there was one classmate, Andrew Chester, that did the most amazing manga drawings. His use of color was mind blowing, and everyone thought he did awesome work. My skills as an artist were not the best, drawing realistic looking people or things was difficult, and I didn't have much of a passion for it. When I saw Andrew's amazing manga though, that really caught my attention!
The Japanese art of manga/anime is very appealing to me. Without sounding weird, the way the females are drawn is extremely 'attractive' to me. After seeing Andrew's work, I found it fascinating enough that I wanted to try it out myself, and see if I was any good at it. All of the video game magazines had lots of games with ads drawn in that style, and I also got some magazines about manga that had lots of things to look at and emulate. So I studied those, paying attention to how the eyes and faces were shaped, and tried to make a drawing of my own. It took me a long time to make that first drawing! Actually, it has always taken a while to do them, as I would only work on them a little each day, or every couple of days. I really enjoyed doing it, but I wouldn't spend hours at a time working on it.
My first manga drawing came out in late 1993, and they progressively got better, little by little. I would ink them with Sakura Pigma Micron pens, then soon I added color to them, using pencil crayons (which is what Andrew used of course). Then the coloring evolved to a mixture of pencil crayons and water-soluble pencil crayons, then watercolors were introduced for the backgrounds only, then the whole thing was colored with watercolors. In the late 90's the materials I used evolved again, with some drawings using graphics printed on transparancies and then overlayed on the original, or graphics printed out on paper, cut out, and glued to the original, so when photocopies were made, it would look seamless. In the late 90's, each year the amount of work I did steadily decreased, and in late 1999, I had taken a break from it. I was frustrated that it took me so long to produce the work, and the amount of money I made from it was negligible. Of course I know that true art shouldn't be concerned with the monetary aspect, but since I wanted to do this as a sort-of career, that part of it was still important to me! In 2003, to celebrate my 10th anniversary, I took some old unfinished sketches, scanned them into my computer, and added some graphical elements to them on my computer, two new drawings were also made. In 2006 I took another old sketch, and completely colored it on the computer for the first time. I haven't done anything new since then, though there are still a couple of sketches that are unfinished. I thought about doing something with them in 2013 for my 20th anniversary, but that never came to pass. I'm most likely never going to draw again. It's been too long, I'm too out of practice, but I'm very proud of the amazing work that I've done, and I always will be!
I'm sorry that I don't have anything from 1994-1999 to show on this site. It's a HUGE amount of work to scan and process all that stuff. You can see bits and pieces from 1997 and 1998 on my DeviantArt page.