Logically Illogical

I started drawing in the 4th grade when I read a lot of Dragon Ball manga.  Akira Toriyama has to be my first influence even though I didn’t know nor care much about his name back then.  All I cared about was Goku.  My classmate taught me how to draw DB characters (he was really realy good), and so I ended up drawing a lot of Gokus.

That was how I used to draw.  Because of my unexplainable obsession with Bruce Lee back then, I also started drawing Bruce Lee and made my own version of Dragon Ball in which Bruce Lee is basically a Goku ripoff and Jason Lee is a Gohan ripoff.

(please, do laugh)

In my school we used saddle-stitched notebooks to take notes.  I used to take out several pages out of the middle and make ridiculously bad comics on them.  Plot? Dragon Ball’s.  Characters?  Bruce Lee and Jason Lee.  Surprisingly, a friend loved it a lot (tells you about the taste of 4th graders), so he started buying some of these comics with his lunch money.  Being the smart kid that I was, I took the money and used it to buy Dragon Ball Z cards from vendors outside school.  Life was great.

Then Detective Conan came in when I was in middle school and all hell broke loose.  I tried copying Gosho Aoyama’s style and it wasn’t working at all.  It was impossible.  I failed and so I quit drawing.  This was 9th grade, I think.

I didn’t pick up drawing again until my freshman year in college when I was downloading random stuff off of DC++ and saw 24 volumes worth of this manga called One Piece.  I downloaded it and read the whole thing in one sitting.  Arabasta had just ended then and I was loving it; it was the arc that got me hooked.  It seemed that a lot of people find the characters “ugly”, but they have a certain appeal to me I can’t explain, so I picked up my pencil again and started drawing on the margins of my notes.  Here’s a drawing I uploaded on DA back in 2004

And it just kinda went on from there.  I haven’t stopped drawing since.  Being a fan of OP means there’s always something you want to draw, because Oda kept coming up with new designs you never really think about.

As for inspiration, I also picked up Yuusuke Murata (Eyeshield 21) and Naoki Urasawa (Monster, 20th Century Boys).  At one point I loved Akira Amano (Reborn) but it was mainly an admiration of how she does clothing folds.  I was never impressed by her characters, as they all kinda look the same to me.

These days, I try to expand my range of inspiration.  I figured if I want to improve on this journey I can’t always keep taking inspiration from just Japanese artists, so I started expanding.  Kim Jung Gi became a massive, massive inspiration after a friend of mine showed me THIS video, in which he drew on a giant piece of paper, a 5-point curvilinear perspective with people and vehicles, and no underdrawing whatsoever.  It goes to show you that the limit of human potential is none, and that if he can do something like that, with enough practice and learning, I’ll be able to get to that point at some point in my life.

Other inspiration I have is Pascal Campion, a french artist who sketches with colors.  He has such an amazing sense of color and composition, everything he posted evokes a different emotion.  Being someone who always draws with lines first to define an object, it’s mindblowing to know that there are people who think in terms colors to dictate a piece. 

Other inspiration I have is a friend of mine, Christie Tseng.  Aside from being an amazing artist, her drive and motivation is endless.  When I lack motivation, or wake up thinking I don’t want do anything for the rest of the day, I ask myself, “What Would Christie Do?” and the answer is usually “she’ll kick your fucking ass and force you to draw.”  She’s the kind of artist who takes a break from drawing by drawing, and when her right wrist is hurting from drawing too much, she trains her left hand to draw for her so she won’t have to stop drawing.  She is the Chuck Norris of artists I admire.

There are many, many others, of course, but this entry is getting lengthy enough as it is.  Let me just list out the other ones I can think of at the top of my head, and you can Google them up: Robh Ruppel, Radford Sechrist, Louie Del Carmen, Boulhem Bouchiba, Glen Keane, Makoto Shinkai, Neil Campbell Ross, and many others.