I've seen a couple of people tell their stories, and I'd like to tell mine.
I joined DA about 6 years ago (I think), but it was a site I visited quite often before that. When I was in middle school, a new friend had told me she also went on the site, so I joined and befriended her on there too. She really inspired me to draw, and although I was really self-conscious about my work, I posted it anyway. They were really bad drawings: I was really inexperienced, terrible with poses, and I had "same-face syndrome."
At some point I switched usernames from my original name (chobtheothgipod) to a newer one (minxymoo) because I needed a fresh start. I wanted to get more serious with my artwork and my dumb sketches from middle school were embarrassing. The username was a "what's your unicorn name" generator, and I felt it didn't sound too bad. This was the name I kept for the rest of high school and into college. I started feeling better about my artwork. I started off doing traditional works (colored pencils and a prismacolor ink pen) but then learned about Paint Tool Sai and started working on my digital artwork. My digital stuff sucked, however, because I didn't have a tablet and it was all done by mouse or trac-pad. It was during this phase of my DA life that the icon family (or FamdA) was created with these lovely people:
I started getting to know them (because most of them were not my friends originally) and found them all to be wonderful people! I really looked to them for inspiration and just to chat, because at this point in my life my irl friends seemed to be diminishing. I really loved being part of this icon family.
Then I hit one of many low points in my life and deactivated my account. I suddenly felt betrayed and didn't want anything to do with DeviantArt. I stopped drawing for an entire summer and I gave up.
However, once the fall semester started again, I missed some of the people from the icon family, and started a new account (hawt-dawg). I found some new people and slowly started to draw again, but since I had given up on digital art, it was all traditional. It was at this time I took a photography class and posted a lot of photos that I had taken. My interest in photography continues to this day:
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For Christmas, I got a tablet from my boyfriend, and though it took me a couple of months to get used to, I really started developing my skills. There was an explosion of improvement last summer, and I decided I wanted to go back to my icon family. I did a contest the following Christmas and got a 1 month membership and changed my name back to Minx (Minxy-Moo). My digital skills have seen a massive amount of improvement over the past year, and I started gaining a lot of followers who started requesting work from me:
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In the future, I hope to continue to develop. I am taking a second photography class, so you can definitely plan on seeing more of my fantastic models: H, C, T, and S. I also hope to continue to develop my anatomy and poses, and coloring is always a work in progress.
I am so thankful for everyone who finds my work inspiring to them, because (to me) having someone see my work and say: "I want to draw because of her," makes it all worth it.
I love all of my friends!
And that's the Minx story. Thanks for reading, friends!