Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

TL:DR - why I will never regret drawing/having drawn so much crappy fanart.

When I was in the last years of university I was having a huge amount of trouble. I had no faith in myself. I was given conflicting advice about my work. I tried to please everyone. I tried not to let my family know how much I was struggling. I didn’t know what my style was or if I should even have one. I was depressed, but I didn’t know that I was; I just thought I was being stupid and overly emotional, so I berated myself for it.

At the time, I didn’t realize it, but the main outlet that I was using to escape the stress was drawing fanart. It was a shelter; a place that I could be creative and contribute without having someone jump down my throat about it. While my work at university floundered and fluctuated, my fanart became more experimental and true to my feelings, as I continued to be inspired and encouraged by people in the community. If I hadn’t had that outlet I don’t know what would have happened. I came close to giving up at school, but I never did when it came to making people smile online.

I came to learn essential lessons about character design and story that I was never taught in school; that good characters always have flaws. That you if you can tell who you’re looking at just by their silhouette, or their hands, or their shoes, that is a brilliant design. That it’s good to have colour associations and motifs, that pushing an expression or pose makes it better, and that with-holding information is more dramatic than drowning people with it. I also came to realize that copying the original style could be informative, but it was only when I was brave enough to go outside the boundaries of what was already there that I produced work that I liked. The more experimental I became, the better the outcome was, and the more I learned. Perhaps I felt more free to do this because I wasn’t being judged for it, perhaps it was because I could relate to the characters better than my own under the circumstances, I don’t know.

What I do know is that I owe One Piece more than I can adequately express, and anything that improves a person’s life, as profitless and self indulgent as it can seem to some people, is never something to be ashamed of. I’m not saying that drawing fanart is better than creating original work, very far from it; what I mean is that it’s not a bad thing, and you should never let anybody tell you that it is. The greatest artists in the world have learned by mimicking those artists that came before them. We don’t use the term fanart to describe what they were doing, but is it so very different?