When and why did you start drawing/writting?

aaa.. my ma has all my past works in a in bin her basement so i can't really show. but i started drawing when i was about 5 or 6. my real dad was a comic artist and so he'd draw a lot all the time and i'd watch him. he created his own superheroes (which i don't remember their names) and it inspired me to make my own, but i could never come up with a superhero. i made a character in kindergarten and named him 'nobody' because i have no idea what to call him when my teacher asked what i was drawing. just said nobody and she said "well, nobody is kinda scary!". it stuck. i still have that character til this day but i was a morbid child and my ma threw away a lot of my 'scary art' which is sO MEAN.

i didn't really know how to draw people and eventually i stopped trying and drew more animals by 3rd grade. i was eventually inspired by InuYasha and Wolf's rain to make dog or wolf ocs.. but then One Piece came along and became a game changer to make me draw people more often. I started writing and roleplaying when i was 11 or 12 and i straight up have not stopped creating since. :0 i'd like to hear you story too! and everybody else that posts!

I started drawing way back but I started drawing manga style around 11 or 12 when I saw some user submitted manga style art in a small section of an American Girl magazine I had XD Back then it was loosely based off the pokemon style too, and then evolved into a more shoujo looking style and then a... more current style thing lol. I've always liked to draw people though,  even before I started drawing manga style.

I made my first ocs around 12-13 since I wanted to make a manga xD Well the "manga" itself only had one chapter before I gave up lmao but the very first three characters stayed until today :D and will stay forever and ever ♡ Around this time (or a little before) was when I started posting my drawings online on dA which you can see when you go to the very back of my gallery.

I liked writing in school when we had fiction topics but that energy is hard to come by now ;; A couple years back, I tried to write out the story idea I had for one of my oc folders but I got a couple "chapters" in before I lost motivation ;; The only thing I still like that's posted is this Hetalia fanfic on my dA and is still probably the best my writing has been XD;;

I started when I was four or five years old? My mom said she encouraged me to start drawing because both of my older brother and younger/twin sister is learning to draw, but I was the only one who didn't. I guess I actually have no exact reason to start other than that gdgdgsfs

Aside from scribbles, fruits and shapes, I remember the first thing I often draw when I started were Powerpuff Girls because of the simple character designs + its my fav cartoon. I think I only branched out to drawing "actual" humans when I was 6 years old, hahah.

I also started obsessing over drawing comics at this age because it's the only thing I read and my brother drawing one comic literally sparked my interest lol, so my first few OCs actually exist from the time I do "original" comics as a child- (and before I created actual OC comics, y'know those thin exercise/note books we use in school? Me and my sis literally have a stack of them with only and only different episodes/chapters of PPG comics that we draw lol)

I do have some past comics, though the oldest I could spot is when I was 10. I'll grab pics now and edit my comment ^^

For writing, uhh, I don't exactly have an exact reason to start but I guess it's because I was sliiightly better in English compared to my class during elementary school that leads to me writing my own essays related to OCs and all, haha.

Edit: HALL OF SHAME TIME 

 I only took two photos because it's quite embarrassing and I do question myself at some panels but

And for a bonus, here's some "pilot" designs for OCs I have here on TH....This was from when I as 11 aka the time I finally knew what style I wanted ghhdghfhs

            Talking about why I started drawing and the point I am today is going to be a major Irony Time™ confession...

          Well, I guess I was about 4? Manga was something within my reach as soon as I learned to read bc I'm a super lucky bastard whose both parents also read manga. Basically after reading manga everyday I wanted to make my own manga? So there goes the period when I drew just to copy everything from the manga series I like. :'D Drew fanart (aka copying the exact pose and character in a panel) or ripped off the entire plot to insert my own characters in place of the original cast. The latter started around grade 5 I think but that was my first contact with the world of creating and keeping OCs.

          I went into full OCs drawing only mode in grade 7 and gradually shifted to the illustration side (spending a long time on one piece) instead of actually drawing manga like I initially intended. My last 'serious' and continuous manga was around grade 10-11. 

          From then, I switched fully to illustration and never drew manga regularly again. Nowadays my habit is firmly established as an illustrator, if I have to draw manga again, the process of deciding the 'camera angle' alone is enough to short circuit my brain on top of being unable to decide how panels lay out on each page should be. The very last time I draw manga for a doujinshi collab with friends, I need almost five months to complete 45 pages.

          As for writing, since I started leaning toward illustration I also began to write fictions of my OCs. I can't recall for sure but I knew I already wrote something around 18. So as to substitute my inability to draw manga, I adopt the approach to write my OCs' stories and occasionally draw something to accompany the writing (portrait of the cast/scene from the fiction). Until early last year, I mainly wrote my fictions in Thai language but gradually wrote more in English the past year since TH added the literature feature. Prior coming to TH, I also wrote dozens of fictions for RP groups I took part in. Last year alone for the one last RP group I joined (AU Fate Grand Order theme), I wrote no less than 20 fictions to complete missions in order to level up my OCs.

i've literally been drawing since i could hold a pencil, i don't have the pics but my mum took a photo of my first real drawing when i was abt one and a half or smthn? it was a pic of my dad :'3 it looked like a typical kid's drawing of a human - like... a big orb w/ two smaller orbs for eyes (that weren't the same size), sticks for arms and legs, and sticks for hair w/ a big wobbly smile djklasjdk

been drawing ever since :'3 caused a lot of trouble for my teachers bc i've always drawn in class - every lesson every day ever since i first started in grade one (prep was only just starting to become a thing then so i didn't do it) - thankfully i had teachers that were cool w/ it as long as i got my work done

i made my first OCs when... well... idk? i think i was abt six-ish but i also don't recall being in school so i might've been four or five? that was axel and savannah !

i've always liked creative writing too! i'd always been a reader and was reading a lot of big books at a v young age (can't focus on novels now tho lol i went backwards big time) and i'd always be writing! that's how axel and savannah happened actually, i was rly interested in playstation games (they fascinated me) so i tried 'making' my own by completely writing up a game book! axel and savannah were the two protagonists of the game haha and i guess my interest in writing kind of went on from there? the plot of the game is basically the backstory written in axel's profile
my fave thing was when back to school sales were on at the shops and they were selling those bulk packs of 5-10 small exercise books for $1 a pack or smthn bc my mum would buy soooo many packs and i'd have like a years supply of empty notebooks and i'd write so many stories and story ideas in each one! 

the biggest story i ever wrote was a 60+ page spyro fancomic when i was in grade five (so ten years old) and i still have it! it ofc also had a bunch of OCs in it i made! i don't have any of those OCs anymore tho - i'd share some pages but i can't find it? it can't be too far tho it'll be in my room somewhere

fact: axel's name was originally scanner, but i changed it when i made this spyro comic and renamed one of my new dragons scanner instead! i rly liked the name for some reason i still don't know why to this day tho

anyway, here's an old pic of axel and savannah! it's the oldest one i can find atm, i threw out all my old art when i moved house last so this is the best i got! i also added a more recent pic of the two for a comparison thing

I started drawing basically ever since I was able to hold a crayon I guess. From mom's side a lot of family members were drawing as well as my dad drew a lot so it stuck with me lmao. I was drawing p such everytime I had a chance and when other kids in school saw it they wanted me to draw pictures for them, so I ended up as a local drawing dealer for quite some time lmao. Also I used to gift shitload of drawings to my favorite teachers lol.

We got a computer with internet when I was like 12 and that's where I managed to utterly destroy any sense of original art style that I failed to escape all the way until 2016 because I discovered Naruto and I ended up redrawing manga or anime screenshots. It taught me fuck all honestly except turning my art style into anime. Listen nothing against anime styles, it's just a thing I personally didn't want to draw anymore but got stuck with it because I drew metric tons of it ok. I started making OCs at the same time because for some reason back then everyone had a fursona/wolf oc? So I just rolled along with it and made a few wolf ocs too. And then I realized I don't like animal ocs this much and went back to drawing humanoids and with that I made first humanoid ocs. In 2017 I managed to start developing my current art style when I wanted to draw a Darkest Dungeon fanart in a similar style and found out that heavy black lineart is fun lmao

With writing I started sometime when I made my first friends on this site and realized "oh you're supposed to write in those profiles" lmao. So fairly recently, so it also all still sucks because writing is hard and I don't do it enough to actually progress rip

I started as soon as I could hold a crayon in my little babby hands! My father's side is artistic (my grandpa even had a painting in the Smithsonian for some airplane special? Can't recall the exact details but he did smth), so my mom and what little I saw of my dad really pushed me to continue to draw. I remember one of my first OCs being a raccoon with a little bow. Created that when I was in kindergarten? Anyways, art has always been a big deal in my family. So, as long as I've been breathing, I've been drawing.

which is part of why I'm so sad I've been in an artblock and ready to quit for a couple years.

i think i've pretty much been drawing and writing since i first learned to hold a pencil. i was a really big reader as a kid and from a really early age i insisted i wanted to be an author and illustrate my own books. i don't really take writing quite so seriously anymore, it's more something i do occasionally and never really share anywhere because i'm not very confident in my abilities, but drawing has always been and still continues to be a big passion of mine, tho it's only been in the last few years or so that i've really started to focus on it and put time and effort into improving my art, mainly because it was a pretty expensive and inconvenient hobby before i got my tablet and i didn't really have the money to be buying sketchbooks and stuff as frequently as i needed to, 

I havent started drawing when i was young, i started drawing and improving a year ago ^^

I started writing when I was... I dunno.... 14? I absolutely loved reading through my entire childhood, and most of my teen years. It resulted in my 'dream job' at the time being that I was a published author. I didn't want the fame, just wanted to be like 'look ma! I'm pubnlished!'. I wanted the pride for that. 

While now I still love to write, I write more in RP form than I do for actual stories. I'm usually too busy drawing lately, lol.

I started Drawing when I was ... well, ok. Let's clarify. By drawing, for now, I mean scribbling on anything I could make a mark on. Lol. I mean that literally, too. I was scribbling/marking up walls, floors, papers, tables, anything I could once I was old enough to be able to comprehend I was doing it - and even before that, or so I'm told.
I started to take art seriously once I got my first sketchbook for my 16th birthday. =) 

I started both writing and drawing when I was around... oh, twelve-ish? So, approximately eleven years ago. 

I mean, I definitely used to doodle a fair bit as a kid, but not really in any way that proved useful later. Mostly like... stick figure kitties and whatnot. Geometrical patterns were kinda my thing for a while, I think. One day, I ran into an old acquaintance on my way back from school who'd started drawing manga stuff a while earlier, and she was extremely good by preteen-standards, and that was the first time I realized that, holy heck, artists are just humans, too, and I could presumably be one, given enough practice. And so I picked up a pencil and started drawing a face half an hour later and I guess I'd forgotten how to not draw by the time it started to be frustrating and difficult and I just kind of stuck with it. 

On the writing side of things, I'd pretty much been constantly reading since I'd turned five years old, but it never really occurred to me that stories are written by people who are, again, just mere mortals. It took stumbling onto some Pokemon fanfiction to make me realize - and I promptly went and used my newfound writing superpower to create some pretty abysmal Pokemon fics. One of my earliest attempts, though, did get a fair amount of positive reactions - and it was a self-insert, first-person-narrated field trip AU. That's pretty much all the Big Writing No-Nos in one fic (well, three fics, technically, because I wrote sequels), and it worked anyway, because it was goofy, silly, ridiculous fun very well-suited to 2007/8. I'd love showing it off because it's just so damn silly, but I'm not a native speaker, so my early stuff was still written in Not English, lol

My prime objective with both those things was always to have fun, though - I never really had much of a game plan for improvement, and I'm easily distracted and easily frustrated, so improvement never came nearly as quickly as it could have.

Bonus: "art"

Oh heck, I think I was around 8 or 9 when I first started taking drawing seriously. I had fun drawing and was really inspired seeing super cool artists on Neopets, so I started drawing a lot, mostly of Pokemon and dragons and stuff.

Around high school I got into drawing The Animes and now I haven't drawn a human in ages because I'm too scared I'll just revert back to anime I'm aware I'll never improve if I don't try but it's Hard to convince myself to do so

Writing is something I was kinda interested in all my life but kinda petered off around... high school again. I'm making small attempts to get back into it.

OC-making... maybe around the same time I started drawing. I think my very first was literally just. A penguin. That wanted to explore the world. With a design where the only unique things were some purple spots.