I Draw For A Living! Hooray!

As some of you may or may not know, my profession is digitally painting sequential art. For the uninitiated, this means I color comics for a living. Similar to most everyone else in this business, I started out as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kid who wanted nothing more than to draw Batman (or, at the time, Sandman; I was an emo kid) when she grew up.

However, when you're 12 and writing, penciling, inking, and coloring your own stuff, you think you can do everything. It wasn't until much later that I cut my teeth in the industry and realized that no, you *can't* do everything. You pick the discipline you're best at and you stick with it, and maybe, just maybe, you'll get lucky and get a shot at an ongoing title.

My on-and-off love affair with the comics industry has been going on for years. I started in the local comics industry way back when, coloring a Filipino manga anthology that no one has probably ever heard of (hello, Ozine). To make a long story short, I realized that I wasn't going to be able to support myself in the manner that I had grown accustomed on the crap local page rate, so I went back to the cash cow that is known as Design.

It wasn't until recently that I left corporate design and decided to give comics coloring another shot-- this time working with indie teams abroad-- and so far it's been going well. I'm hoping I won't have to go back to designing since comics is by far what I want to do with my life, and fingers crossed that things work out.

This seems like an awfully introspective post to start the day off with, but I just realized that my 25th birthday is in two days. There's a quarter of my life gone by and really, what do I have to show for it?

If what we do in life echoes through eternity, then I should probably get a move on. ;)