My interest in art started from the influence of watching anime in an Astro Channel called AxN. I have also watched Fruit Basket from a normal TV channel that speaks in Malay, I love the opening and closing song so much that I have a recording tape that I records the music onto the cassette (yes, my child hood grew up that way, CDs only became something when I was around 10). I remember lusting over Card Captor Sakura Animation CDs when I was in high school. They were something considered SUPER POPULAR back in those days.
With that in mind I started drawing a lot of manga characters, this also includes cult classic like Digimon and Pokemon. Not to mention, these classics have many versions which of course, I do consider myself outdated and no longer gives any attention of their further releases aside from first to the second season.
Moving on to high school, I joined the Manga Society. We have classes weekly and learn the basics of manga drawing. This includes figure proportion, styling, as well as techniques and all that jazz to make a manga. Little would I have thought, I stayed in the group for straight 5 years and became the Vice President during my senior years. Back then, drawing comic is everything to me. I could stay up all night to draw comic, as well as prepare for competitions. Fortunate enough, my hard works did pay off, and in honor I received first place awards twice in some competition. Aside from that, I am glad that my parents are very supportive of my interest. (but of course they do constantly make sure I am not doing any porn-y stuff) (but I did some anyway- it’s just that it’s less erotic)
In my high school years, I’m not a smart student on most subjects and I would spend time drawing on textbooks, exam papers etc. Me and my close friends used to dream of becoming a great mangaka one day. Which unfortunately we have gone our separate ways. Well, I mean I do still dream of becoming a mangaka one of these days if things that need to settle in reality were gone. If did not settle down by being a painter/ fine art artist, being an illustrator is pretty cool too.
When I was a 5th grade, there are two well-known art academies in the city where I live-Dasein Academy of Art and The One Academy (aka TOA). At that time, TOA has a higher reputation than Dasein and discussions of which school to choose can be found on forums. While both academies do provide Illustration majoring course, Fine Art course was not available in TOA’s programme during that period. Secondly, TOA’s tuition fee is double of Dasein’s. To made up my mind, I joined a competition for soon-graduate high-schoolers organize by TOA, the winning prize is free tuition fee while studying there. The competitors are very strong and I was not up to the game. Therefore I decided to study in Dasein.
-to be continued..
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