I = Artist?

It is hard to choose a favourite piece of work, but one that I am definitely proud of is a comic I drew for my October Newsletter:



Backstory: My whole life, I considered myself a non-artsy person. I was a mathy-sciencey person. That's just who I am. It was part of my identity. From Grade 3 to Grade 8, my sole focus was to perform well on math contests. I spent most of my free time learning about advanced math and science concepts; I enjoy it. I was the worst artist in my grade 2 art class.

Nowstory: I spent about 14 days in a date range from November 5th to November 22nd on this comic. I spent 3 hours on the first frame. One of the frames took 7 hours. Some days, I spent 5 hours on the comic. Sometimes, I streamed the drawing process on Twitch. I don't know how many total hours I spent on that comic, but boy it was a lot. I estimate in the 20s to 30s range.

The reason that I am proud is that I genuinely believe that this was good artwork. From that point onwards, I saw myself as someone who had a sense of aesthetics, who has the ability to draw. I no longer saw myself as the worst artist in my grade 2 art class whenever I thought about art.



I even had a whole establishment of content creation philosophy around why I chose to spend time on making my newsletter "engaging."

I got lots of positive responses. Being an artist even got associated with who I am at some point:



Today, I am getting increasingly more and more into design and video-creation, both of which are more artsy leaning than sciency/mathy leaning. I want to keep being an artist and exploring my creativity throughout my whole life, into adulthood. I never want to lose my desire to be artistic.