First post

So. I want to be a comic book artist. A penciller to be specific.

I've wanted to be one since I was a teenager and I plowed through issue after issue of Uncanny X-Men and Avengers. Pretty much all of my money was spent at the local corner store where they had one of those, "Comics sold here!" racks. Looseleaf meant for school duotangs ended up all over my bedroom floor, covered with sketches of my takes on John Byrne, Alan Davis, Jim Lee, Mark Silvestri, Art Adams, John Romita Jr. and many more artists I adored.

I could draw too. Sure, most of it was pretty derivitive but heck, I understood proportion and scale. I had a good sense of movement and was great with expressions. Or so I remember.

I'm going to dig through some of that stuff and post it here. Then we'll see how accurately I remember it. My weak points were pretty obvious though. Men looked girly and I never did backgrounds. But heck, after seeing Rob Liefeld and Chris Wozniak's stuff and one particularily godawful penciler in a couple of issues of Alpha Flight I knew I at least had a chance if I stuck with it. If those guys could suck and still find work, there was hope for me.

However, I did not stick with it. I floundered a bit after high school not working or in minimum wage jobs. I was involved with provincial youth politics in my spare time and drawing devolved to an occasional thing. Then I met a guy, got pregnant and married (yes, in that order) and then didn't really draw, aside from the odd neopet or dragon for the kids to colour for about 8 years. 8 years. Holy crap.

But I dug up my old comic book collection 6 months ago. I read a couple with some gorgeous stuff by Art Adams. I just recently read Astonishing X-Men with John Cassaday (oh good lord, a new idol to worship!). And boy, I have that bug again. And boy, my art now sucks the big one.

Got to go tuck some kids into bed.