My Full Art Journey
This post is adapted from this thread from May 5, 2025.
I would like to share my full art journey, which I have never told (or shown) before. Read on to learn what happened between then and now!
The Early Years
As long as I can remember, I loved to draw. People told me I was good at it. In kindergarten and elementary school I jumped at every opportunity to draw or paint.
Throughout childhood, I spent most of my time at home sitting on the floor or couch with a big hardcover book on my lap, a mechanical pencil, and a stack of printer paper.
My dad was a huge Mac guy, and I played with a program called Kid Pix constantly. This also taught me how to navigate a computer’s UI!
Manga and the Digital World
In middle school, I became friends with a girl from Japan named Megumi. She introduced me to manga and anime — not just Pokémon, which I loved, but things like Fruits Basket, Fullmetal Alchemist, and more.
We bought “How to Draw Manga” books and followed tutorials on rudimentary websites. I became obsessed. I didn’t want to draw fan art — I made my own characters and stories.
I doodled constantly in class. I still have a callus on my right middle finger from where I held the pencil.
My mom’s boyfriend at the time was a graphic designer and got me a pirated copy of Photoshop 7. I learned all the ins and outs of this program, editing photos and making digital art.
I soon learned that artists were making amazing digital art with something called a “Wacom tablet,” which let you use pressure to adjust opacity or brush size. I desperately wanted one.
High School
In high school, I kept working to develop my manga-inspired style. I was also super into “gothic lolita” fashion, as you can see here! My AP studio art portfolio was all manga-inspired work.
Around age 15, my art teacher told my dad I should take a class at the Art Students League in NYC. It was a live model oil painting class — both totally out of my comfort zone and an incredible opportunity.
I was so intimidated. The first class had a nude model!! I’d NEVER seen anyone naked before, so I switched out. I don’t remember much from the sessions I did attend, but here is the only painting that survived:
Now, with what I’ve self-taught, I can see I actually did really well with the limited tools and experience I had! The canvas was 16x20, totally inappropriate for a beginner, and I had no instruction on color theory or brushwork.
My dad gave me a hard time about how expensive the supplies were and insisted that I had to make money if I wanted to keep doing art.
I knew I wasn’t good enough yet. And I had no idea how to get there.
DeviantArt and the Internet
I had a DeviantArt account and was obsessed with page views. I still didn’t want to make fan art, but it seemed like the only way to get popular. I tried to adapt my style but it never felt right.
College
I went to an eccentric liberal arts college with no majors, no grades — just narrative evaluations. I’ve posted about how financially unprepared I was, but creatively, it was a dream.
(This trippy self-portrait is from college. I also feel obligated to say I never did drugs in college lol.)
I determined I couldn’t afford to chase the dream of being an artist. I didn’t have a stable home to fall back on, and didn’t believe I could make it financially. So I pivoted to early childhood education — still creative, but “practical.”
I also became interested in children’s books as a common thread between early childhood education and the visual arts. I dabbled with watercolors and tried to develop an illustration style.
My college friends were really into webcomics — stuff like A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage Is Irreversible and Buttercup Festival — and I drew inspiration from those.
I read Understanding Comics and tried to make my own, including one based on the Nintendo game Mother 3! But again, I’m not into making fan art, so that didn’t last.
After College
After college, I learned the job market was so saturated I’d need to get my master’s degree to be competitive. I worked multiple part-time jobs.
In 2013, I tried to sell print-on-demand greeting cards of pen-and-ink drawings online with no success. I have always hated marketing and was a serious introvert at this point.
The Pen-and-Ink Years
Then in 2015, I gave up on being a teacher and switched to my first IT job. I got really into pen and ink drawing again. I was obsessed with Celtic knotwork and natural subjects.
I uh… got tired and stopped drawing when Pokémon Go came out. These were never finished.
Experiments and Etsy
I began experimenting with wood burning and made some jewelry. I started an Etsy shop without knowing what I was doing.
For years I dabbled with watercolor, linocut printing, calligraphy — little projects here and there.
The Breakthrough: Acrylics (2020)
Then in 2020, working from home for the first time, I picked up acrylics after a 12-year hiatus. I was… instantly really good?
It felt like all the previous work had paid off. I still had so much to learn, but didn’t know that yet. I painted a pizza place’s facade and sold it to them for like $200 — my first sale!
It was important to me, though, to paint because I wanted to — not for profit! The ghost of my dad’s words “you need to make money off this” haunted me, and I didn’t want to turn another thing I loved into a hustle.
Finding My Way (Now)
I painted tons of acrylic pieces through 2023. I put progress videos on Instagram (might pick that back up, not sure).
And then finally, in 2024, I gave oil painting an earnest try — and fell completely in love.
These past few years of painting reflect a big change in me. My old pen drawings were technically impressive but rigid — driven by obsession, precision, and a need to prove myself. They were beautiful, but they were armor.
Now my paintings explore light, nature, rhythm. I’m loving the process and finding inspiration everywhere. I have ideas about where I want to go, and I’m excited instead of terrified.
Like I said earlier, I didn’t pursue art professionally because I never had a safety net. My home life was unstable, I was $70k in debt, and I couldn’t afford to “struggle as an artist.” So I built a career in tech and kept art as a parallel life.
A few weeks ago, I shared a thread about how hard things have been lately — frankly, the full dissolution of my life and future as I knew it.
I was stunned by how many people reached out, not just once but repeatedly. I realized maybe for the first time: I’m not alone. I do have people I can lean on. It took making myself vulnerable — something I’ve avoided my whole life — to see that.
That shifted something in me. I don’t want all the work I’ve made — some of it never shown to anyone — to just sit in a bin or line the hallway.
I want to share it with the world.
I’ll be slowly exploring this idea and sharing more soon about ways to support my practice — through commissions, subscriptions, or other organic forms of connection. For now, I’m just grateful to have finally told this story.