Even if you just draw for a hobby, when was it that you stopped doing kiddie drawings and began taking drawing seriously? You know, working at it, actively trying to improve your craft rather than just drawing for the fun of it?

(I never did.)

At the age of 10, I stopped drawing strictly from memory and began my attempts to draw like Neal Adams, Curt Swan, and Jim Aparo.

It wasn't until my college classes that I realized that I would get better results from drawing from real life.

From age 10 to 16, my walls were covered with my takes on Byrne's Superman, Art Adams' Wolverine, Jim Lawson's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and others.

I really wish I had kept those drawings. I did a really cool rendering of Jack Nicholson's Joker from a photo in Premiere magazine.

I was making 20 page comics in 4th grade, and drawing superheroes since kindergarten. Haven't really put pencil to paper for more than a doodle in over a decade though...

8 or 9, maybe even as young as 7. I was partially raised by a professional artist though, so my experience was not typical. I had a lot of strange happenings kids under 10 don't traditionally do.

I'm a seriously late bloomer. I've drawn for fun since I was five, and in elementary school I progressed from tracing to copying to doing my own drawings, but I really just got serious about it in the last two or three years.

I remember being as young as five and feeling jealous that Jonathan Hales was drawing people with blocky feet , while I was literally just scribbling away. I remember feeling horribly inferior at that point. I don't know what happened after that, but I recall being around 6-7 and being miles better than anyone else my age- and that seemed to be the status quo all the way through school.

I guess I never really applied myself until I went to college and met other people that could draw- mainly because I didn't need to. Looking back, I'd say that being naturally good at something can make it easier to under achieve.

These days I'm always looking for new tricks and techniques- constantly looking for the next great revelation. I can honestly say that I've learned something new at least once a week for the last 8 years or so, since I went digital.

This is why I am working in IT instead of writing and/or drawing for a living. I was more than a little good at both until I had to apply myself to take it seriously, and I took the lazy way. My work in IT, while it's well-paying, specialized and not something everyone can do well, has come so, SO easily to me. Even when maximizing my income I've taken the lazy way, I have to admit.

At 6 my class did an art jam on a large rolled out sheet of newsprint, depicting the last supper. All of the other kids drew stick figures, I drew my apostle as a crude representation of what Curt Swan or Carmine Infantino would've drawn. It wasn't much, but it was obviously years ahead of their talents. At first I thought that they were all retarded in some way. It didn't occur to me that I could do something that most other kids couldn't (my older brother is an artist, compared to him I was mediocre at best).

It made up for sucking in sports.

Curious about this. I never took drawing seriously. Lil' Taft sometimes says he'd like to draw comics for a living -- TERRIBLE career choice, son!! -- or do comic strips (he periodically does one about our cat, "The Adventures of Fat Cat"), so I encourage him to work at it and draw from real life and blah blah blah. You know the advice. Don't want to push him, though, lest I turn his love into work at an early age. It's fun for him; I'm inclined to keep it that way.

Just curious when, if he truly is serious, a more serious approach might click into place.

I dunno. My Mom claims I really didn't draw all that much as a kid.

I do remember drawing a particular building, one that I saw in a park in Winnipeg, sometime in Grade 3, and really being happy with it. It would have been shortly after that when I started taking it kinda-sorta seriously.

By Grade nine or ten I was seriously wanting to do it for a living.

May 2006 <_<

Although I've been drawing as far back as I can remember, I would say that my serious art education started in tenth grade when I took my first "real" art class.

Vlad

I always took it seriously as a little kid. It's when I got to be an adult that I started taking it less seriously (to my extreme detriment).

Second Grade. In second grade my teacher made a deal with me. I could draw in an orange sketchpad she made for me if I finished my homework. I remember drawing Snoopy and making up my own comic strip feature robins (which I never finished).

It tells me that I (a) must have been ignoring my homework and (b) drawing, although I don't remember any before that point.

I wish I still had that sketch pad.