How I started making money from my drawings after 22 years
How I started making money from my drawings after 22 years.
I have been a cartoon-worm since I was a kid. Other kids looked at a comic book or a cartoon show and went “yeah, it was ok.” but I said “nice!”. You see I always did like the imaginative world more than the real world. Somehow the imaginative world somehow made more sense to me most of the time. Plus the imaginative world was super fun and still is!
Stating the obvious ; I started to draw my own, at first by copying or tracing stickers (of ThunderCats) and comic books (Tintin) using carbon copy. I traced hard and I traced a lot, soon I figured out how to draw without tracing and I started my own comic book Falcon the Third. That was back in 1991, I was in grade 8 and i was around 13 years old. I did that after I realized my school mates have lost their childhood and have become to think they are all grown-up and adults at age 13. Boys interested the girls and girls interested the boys. There were lots of talk and discussion about sex and adult films and magazines.yeah I was into it too but I never did fine the pure joy that I found in my comic books and cartoons.
So I revolted and started working on holding on to my childhood dearly by myself. Drawing and keep on drawing was the way to do so, also this way I can be in a world of my own, entirely imagined by myself. I kept on reading Tintin, Asterix, DC and Marvel comics. I had lots of them cause my Dad would always buy me one after each Friday prayer to which I went with him from age 8 onwards.
I kept drawing, I kept writing my comic book scripts and stories. I copied some and I imagined most of the contents. Pretty soon by 2001 I had lots of episode and a good character base for my comic book, but I never did actually show it to the general public except for some few selected friends and my younger brother. I was not confident of my drawing quality or my comic book stories at all.
Then finally just half a decade ago I got the hang of drawing using computer softwares. That was the time I started to feel confident of mydrawings. That drawing , after 8 years in the making, finally started to make me some good money today. As my wife helped me both translate and distribute them to her school kids I realized one thing – kids today wants to be all grown up and they actually feel quite stupid reading hardcopy comic books in this age of 3d animations, gadgets and iPad’s. I feel really sorry for these kids because the very childhood I always dearly wanted to hold on too is the very childhood they want to let go of! Besides comic reading actually contributed more to my learning English than all my school English classes ever did!
Never let go of the best things in life unless it lets you go.
