Art and a little life update

When I was a kid, I annoyed my parents regularly by leaving printer paper strewn about the house, covered in half-done comics and the characters in my head. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, the answer would have been “cartoonist.” As is not uncommon, that is not what happened.

I’m in my thirties now, and I’ve been a software engineer for almost a decade. It’s fun, and it’s reasonably creative, but I’m not exactly spending my nights doing open source projects or prepping for PyCon. As it turns out, I’m still drawing — to the extent that a guy with the mouse and some free flowchart software can. Countless evenings messing around in Google Drawings have gotten me through a lot of the whole adulthood thing, including and definitely not limited to finally figuring out my gender identity at the age of 28 (what can I say; I’m from Texas).

Anyhow, it was the characters in my head — ever evolving, but always my best friends — who lived ordinary and magical lives when my closeted self couldn’t, appearing in everything from angsty one-off doodles to an attempt at a webcomic that is thankfully, mostly lost to the sands of internet time. You’ll see a lot of those one-off drawings here, as well as a few other pieces that came to light over time as I figured out new ways to do things. Everything is made entirely in Google Drawings and done with the mouse alone.

So, why do I want to study illustration?