Growing up, I’ve always loved superheroes and cartoons. In fact, watching these fostered the creative mind inside of me. The imagination and creativity involved in every animation and character I saw always impressed me, and that’s when I started doodling at the age of 3! Drawing and artwork were so fun to me that they became a core component of my childhood. Whenever I read an illustrative book and came across a colourful and detailed picture, I’d spend hours drawing out the lines and filling in the colours. Whenever I saw a scene I liked on TV, I’d pause it and draw it out. Whenever I saw a VHS or CD cover that I liked, I’d do the same.
But, nothing beat the love I had for cartoons. When I was in grade school, Pokemon trading cards were the craze. I became an avid trading card collector not because I wanted to play the game (in fact, to this day, I still have no idea how to play the trading card game), but because I wanted to sketch every Pokemon there was! In the end, I actually was able to collect the cards, but I had a set of drawings with each Pokemon in it. Back then, there were only the first two generations of Pokemon, but with the cartoon series alongside the cards, that gave me over 250 different characters to draw in different resting and action poses!
Come high school, I grew out of Pokemon and starting focusing on superheroes. At Rockway Mennonite Collegiate, I took multiple visual arts classes to help improve my background in art history and artistic skills to nourish my hobby. I also took website coding and programming courses to improve my skills as a then-novice website designer. When I got to university and started my degree in Biomedical Sciences and Physics, my focus turned to drawing scientific schematics and illustrations for presentations and papers because it wasn’t just fun, but rather involved quite a bit of active thinking as to how physical and biological processes worked.
But no matter what, I still love superheroes and cartoons. To be frank, I may even love them more because of the improvements and evolution of graphic design and illustrative artwork. The tools available to artists nowadays are endless, which means that the extent of your creativity is your only limit. All you need is a pencil and paper, or as most people prefer today, a mouse and a screen! While the evolution of graphic design software has allowed me to learn a new skill set in drawing computer-generated vectors and illustrations, I look back at the cartoons and the drawings from my childhood and have a newfound appreciation for the “old-school” method.
That is why, once in a while, I sit down, pick a cartoon character to draw, and experience the nostalgia of illustrating with coloured pencils, felt-tipped pens, and a sheet of paper. As an avid superhero fan, I’ve tended to pick some of my favourite superheroes to draw over the past few years as I try and juggle life between work, volunteering, and a doctorate. Some of them are showcased in this post!
Artwork and design have always been a strong component of my life, and I’m ecstatic that I can share this passion through the work I do at CryoDragon.
– Brenda
