Hello everyone, turtledance here. Today I had started a new short series of posts about art, to be specific, this post will be about "budget comic making". This will be a tutorial about making comics on a really tight budget, and when I say "tight budget" I specifically say that this is more targeted to kids that almost has 0 dollars worth of money in their pockets.

The other day, I've been browsing into some Facebook groups related to art. In those groups you'll find many things like, inktober contents, sketches of random celebs and animes , art memes, portraits and portraits... Yeah, basically most of them are portraits of a person that they drew by copying from a piece of photo (which personally I don't find productive in some ways). We have more stuffs going on too like video tutorials, livestreams and other things that I wouldn't want to mention here because this post will get longer than its supposed to be. But among them all there is this one type of posts that kinda struck into me and took my attention. I'll call that type of post that I saw as "art supplies fetish".

"Art supplies fetish" is a term I just made up which implies to a picture or post about drooling over or being over excited about an art supply or a whole bunch of them. These art supplies can be a new set of color pencils, new set of water colors or an office filled with art supplies with the usual tagged comment at the bottom "this is my dream" or "someday I'll have all of these for real", like, you get the point of this term that I made up. I would want to talk more about this term but I will save that for another post, I just shared that thought so everyone who reads this post(hopefully some people read it) knows the fuel for me to make this "manga on a budget" series.

With that said, let's hop into the first lesson!

This is all you need to get started man!

I started drawing 9 years ago when I was still 18. I can still remember that time, I dropped out from my first college and started to browse over the internet to find myself a job. Well, to be honest, I tried looking for a job for a couple of minutes then I ended up reading in a manga site known as "onemanga.com". This site is no longer around(I supposed) but you can see how I ended up today with this just very little info about what I did that day.

I left college because of things that I find wrong about it, as a young person, I can't pin point whats wrong with me attending a college that "my parents forced me to attend" but because I'm in a wrong place, issues were meant to come up as I go until that day that I completely got destroyed from the inside.

After I left school, everyone was judging me, as if I was some kind of disgusting person that made some kind of heinous crime. Hahaha, how I describe it is funny but its true, people will judge you when you do something outside of the "norm". Regardless of if the "norm" is right or wrong, as long as you're not in it, "you're wrong". You are disgusting, at least in the point of views of these "normies".

So yeah, that's one of the lowest days that I had, its not the "very lowest" but it was the start of the coming consecutive dark years to come.

You see, that day, I've read my first comics. I can no longer remember the titles of the comics that I read but I can still remember the emotions that I felt that time when I started reading comics. Hours passed while I read and I forgot about my problems, its like, within my darkest times manga/comics somehow saved me from being devoured from all these gloom. Cause of these comics, I kept fighting so I was able to avoid my own doom.

Since that day, the idea of me studying art or making comics to be specific came into me as the phrase, "hey, I can also do these kind of stuff, why don't I start learning to draw?" started to get into my head.

I can still remember that time, I completely have no money and so for me to get started, I collected all the scrap papers with parts where I can still draw and all the old pencils that I have. I collected every art supply that I have in the house even those old crayons that we just neglected at some place cause no one wanted them anymore.

Erasers, pencils and papers... Those were the basic things that I need to get started and somehow I was right. Since that day, I started drawing everyday whenever I have the time. People around me, my parents and my other relatives thought that I was wasting my time or I was crazy for some reason. Yeah, they thought I was crazy cause I got interested into drawing "thats how the norm works here".

To be honest, during those times, I have no idea what I was doing, all I did understand was "I want to draw" and I know somehow "I'll go somewhere better than this" with this new interest that I have. That was just intuition, and yeah, things were hard but I kept on going. Somehow I knew that these trials and challenges were way better than attending college. Hahaha, people might pin point out here that I have so much hate with college and this post is somehow an agenda against it. Actually no, this is my personal experiences and my opinions that grew out of those experiences. I don't hate the school system completely because its there. I hate it because people believe in it too much as if its a religion, worse, they worship it as if its a medical drug that solves everything while in reality, its not.

I hate these "norm" about having a degree is the ideal thing to have rather than "actual skills" because fuck that! These false ideals almost destroyed me at some point. And thats my personal beef on it. Thats just it.

You see, you get the point in this short story about me. There is no one that can stop you if the "will" to move forward is there, that is why I find this "art supply fetish" to have some issues (which I will be tackling on another post). It is not that because that you don't have money to buy supplies or the money to get art classes that stops you, its just you. So to you, kid, get your butt in there and start drawing!

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Everything in this post are mine!