Last week, I asked my Twitter following what questions they would like to see answered in a blog post. I only got one reply, but it was a doozy.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">How and why did you get into art? How, if at all, does it inform the stories your write?</p>— Jared Leys (@jaredleys) <a href="
10, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It isn’t that I’ve never been asked this question before, it’s just that the answer is both simple and complicated at the same time. How I got into art is simple: One day I picked up a crayon and started drawing and then I just didn’t stop. That’s all. Thanks for reading.
Okay, just kidding. I don’t remember getting into art at all, you see. My mother tells me I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to hold a pencil. She still has some of my original work. I think most people experiment with art at a very young age; I just kept going with it and never stopped. However, I lived under the impression that I could never make a decent living off of art and so I didn’t really take it seriously until a few years ago. That was when my art really took off. I’ve been consistently improving since then. To this day, I have never taken a single lesson. I read lots of books and studied great illustrators. That’s all I’ve ever done.
Now for the second question: does my art inform my writing? In all honesty, I have no idea. Since I’ve been creating art and writing stories for so long, I don’t know what it would be like to make one without the other. Since I was young, I’ve been doing comics, which is both art and story, so I suppose one does often inform the other, but I couldn’t explain how if I wanted to. There are times when I’ve written a scene for my comic Legend of the Sword Bearer in the script, but when I get down to drawing it, I change it, sometimes dramatically, because I think it would look better on paper. So I suppose you could look at it that way.
I hope this is an adequate answer. I did the best I could.
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Thanks for reading and have an amazing week!