Here Comes Your Girl (Part 1)

February 7, 2023

Who Am I?

Karin Wanderer. I paint flora & fauna & Miyamoto Usagi fanart.

What Is This?

This is my blog, where I will mostly talk about learning how to draw & paint on a shoestring budget. It’s only my second entry, so I’ll be talking about how I started & how I got to this point. It’s a short story- I’m a pretty new artist.

How Did This Start?

Last September I was reading Usagi Yojimbo (one of my favorite comics) & at one point he made a face I really liked. Stan Sakai had drawn his determined expression in a way that captivated me. There was a pencil and some scrap paper near me, so on impulse I picked it up and drew this

pic of sketch

When I was done, I looked at it & I laughed out loud.

This is terrible I thought.

I really like it!

Then What Happened?

I drew Usagi a lot. I drew him standing, sitting, & leaping through the air. I even drew him on a skateboard! I spent the last week of September realizing that I loved drawing, then drawing until my wrist ached. I rested my arm on a heating pad & kept drawing. I asked myself, out loud, “what am I going to do with all these Usagi pencil sketches?” Then I learned about a little tradition called Inktober!

Inktober is an art challenge for the month of October. There is a theme for every day, but you don’t have to follow it (I mostly didn’t.) By the end of the month, I was drawing Usagi mashed up with Simpsons characters, Dr. Seuss characters… any & everything I could think of. I was also coloring the pictures using Infinite Painter (the free intro version) on my phone (a Note8) because my dollar store markers were not up to the task. I was head over heels in love with art, even if I was calling them “my silly pictures.”

This is getting to be longer than I thought. Click here for Part 2! Same Karin time, same Karin channel!

Karin Wanderer Learns