My art journey - who I am and how I got here

Hello! I just realized I haven't written a proper bio for myself so far, and think it'd be important to do so. My homepage's summary is very brief. Too brief to tell the whole story that happened throughout all these years. It's a story of many ups and downs and a five-year hiatus that was decisive in hirings and put me in the position I am in today.

I was born in Brazil, in a middle-class family. My family is small and doesn't have a lot of friends. Some relatives passed near my birth, and the family remains small to this day.

The streets of the city where I was born were very dangerous. I wasn't allowed to play outside, so I had to stay inside and watch cartoons. I'm an only child, so playing alone was very lonely, and I would get bored after a few hours.

As a kid, I've always liked drawing. When I was born, there were no smartphones, and the internet was just starting, so I didn't get to spend too long in front of a computer. I was privileged enough to watch Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. I would always draw cartoons from memory. My mom's occupation also required her to read a lot, so she would buy a lot of comics and magazines, and sometimes the magazines also came with manga. That's how I got my first manga collection -- Cardcaptor Sakura. At first, I thought the pages were black and white because it was a coloring book. I regret coloring some of the pages of the first volume.

One of my childhood drawings. I must have been 6-7 years old when I drew this.

I was constantly motivated by my mom and my grandma. Since the art supplies were back then very limited, my mom would constantly bring me sheets of paper from work that were only printed on one side so I could draw on the other, as well as children's books, notebooks, and coloring materials. My mom says that back then, I already had a notion of perspective, to which I say: "Mom??" I also liked crafts and other types of creations, so I sometimes made maquettes with normal office paper. Nowadays, I'm an architect, but there's nothing I hate more than making maquettes.

In school, I was a reserved kid. I liked to be on my own and draw. We had an art subject, and everyone would look at me when they had an art project. The school's coordinator would also point at me when the other kids were getting too mischievous. "Look at her, she's drawing. Go draw with her!"

As a kid, I would already participate in contests with my mom's incentive. I never won anything at that time, but that was a decisive factor in building my resilience and determination.

In the age of 11-12, I had moved to another city and started taking anime-style focused classes. I was heavily influenced by anime like Cardcaptor Sakura, Tokyo mew mew, Super doll Licca-chan, Corrector Yui, Kaleido Star, Medabots, Beyblade, Digimon, Ashita no Nadja, and others. At the time, anime was not as popular and mainstream as it is today. Being an anime fan would easily set you up for a life in the middle of the isolated ones and the weirdoes of the class.

I would feel absolute joy watching anime on TV, but I found it too complex and practically impossible to draw. Little did I know that one day, my mom would find a manga-style drawing class and sign me up. The teachers themselves didn't know what they were teaching. They didn't have access and were not using official books or magazines from the industry; they didn't know about fundamentals and weren't contest winners themselves. Therefore, my work improved very little; it improved more outside of the classes, just by drawing every day. Looking back now, those classes were pretty useless. They were good at killing my loneliness and connecting me with similar people, but bad at pretty much everything else.

At 12, I had already mastered the technique of colored pencils and started posting on DeviantArt and some internet forums. I learned English as I posted, and started winning online art contests, which I don't count today because they weren't official.

Some of the drawings from that time that won contests.

By posting my art, I started getting critiques at a very young age, which can be well... pretty demotivating. Some people would criticize my art without my permission, and I didn't know how to handle it. Ultimately, I started thinking that it was my fault for not being able to take critiques. But I also got determined to keep posting and not let anybody criticize me anymore, by putting up better work.

Later on, it got to a point where my manga-style classes didn't make sense anymore. It felt like the teacher didn't have more to teach and couldn't push me any further. That's why I say, whenever you take a course, make sure that the teacher has a relevant resumé. But I was just a kid, and information on the subject was still pretty scarce.

 All of the traditional work here is still somewhere in my drawers - I never threw any of my artworks away, except for very unfinished drawings.

At the age of 15-16, I started drawing like never before. Life at home was difficult. I had a pretty hard relationship with my mom at the time, so drawing was a means of escapism for me. School was tedious, and it would upset me for not allowing me to draw more. At that time, I was already trying out watercolors, but my main medium would still be colored pencils.

I wanted to work as an artist for some spare money, but if I wanted to do that, I would have to transition to digital art. That transition was very turbulent. I got my first tablet, but since I wasn't allowed to use the computer-I had a very strict upbringing- I couldn't use it and develop my digital art skills. So, every time I posted digital art, it would do considerably worse than my traditional art.

At the time, the most prominent software for digital art was Paint Tool SAI, a work of a single programmer. I had no idea how layers or the tools worked, because I didn't have enough screen time to figure it out. By learning to use Photoshop, you could figure out any other software in this medium. My mom knew how to use Photoshop, but she had no patience to teach me. I then spared some money for a course, but I didn't have enough. My mom ended up helping with part of the remaining funds, so I took a one-month-long Adobe package course that changed my life.

I remember wanting a Daily Deviation -- which is the same as having one of your artworks featured on the whole website for a day. I struggled to receive opportunities and the recognition I wanted. I made multiple drawings and submitted them to the feature, but failed. Until the 1st of August 2012. I woke up early to take my Photoshop class. My phone had glitched and wasn't showing any of my DA notifications. I went to my class, opened the internet, and was in absolute awe at the surprise. My art was featured and got more than fifteen thousand views. I also remember reaching 2k followers on the website at the time.

My Daily Deviation on DeviantART

2013 hit, and I had no social media accounts. DeviantArt, the only online art hub at the time, had been crushed by being sold to another company (ironically, this company is Wix, the same platform I'm using to write this blog post). Suddenly, no one was using it anymore, and I lost all my followers. That was a very shocking hit for me, and it acted pretty much like a trauma to my art career. I had to start over. No backup plan and nowhere to go.

I was also forced by school to go on a hiatus. I got close to entering university, and had to take an exam that would determine what I would do for the rest of my life. In Brazil, students don't pay anything for their tuition in public Universities. University was still seen as one of the only ways of social ascension, so competition was very high then.

If you asked me, I didn't want to go to University, but gave up to social pressure. I was also thinking of immigrating to some other country -- I have never felt attached to the place where I was born and raised--, and no immigration wants a citizen who doesn't have a higher education. Besides, since it was free, I had no reason not to do it. At the time, I was doing occasional commissions, and I knew I'd end up becoming an artist for a living.

For context, entering university where I live is considerably different from the US. There is no college, and you must decide and enter the course you want to take while signing up for the exam. Of course, it's a decision students spend their whole high school years thinking about, but it's a lot of pressure. You are not allowed to enter university and decide later on what type of professional you want to be. If you make the wrong choice, you have to quit and take the exam again.

For a long time, I thought the best decision was to go for graphic design, but I didn't pass the entrance exam -- I was overwhelmed with physical and mental stress. That was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me; nowadays, the graphic design field is almost completely taken over by AI, and not valued at all. So, I tried out Architecture and Urbanism. I passed, and that's when my 5-years hiatus started.

The art hiatus was frustrating, but I knew I had to take my course seriously. My Adobe package course helped me very much in the initial moments. I was the only one in my class who took something like that. As you can imagine, I had to learn much more than making maquettes and blueprints; I learned to work in teams and form alliances. For someone born alone and considered the smart kid for most of my life, it was very difficult. I can say confidently that it was where I created enemies more easily than friends.

So many art mentors say you should try to draw at least one hour a day, or make time for it. Maybe I should've drawn during class, but I wanted to take my course seriously. Maquettes were extremely time-consuming, and I can't draw for just one hour a day. I am TOO PASSIONATE to sit down and draw for only one hour, stressing about not being able to draw more.

In 2016, busy due to university, and I was rejected from an application for a game project that could have changed my life. I talk more about this in my Youtube video.

In 2019, the university was coming to an end. I took fewer subjects and started building ground for my full-time artist career. So, I started building my social media and posting finished drawings again, from the ground up.

As you can tell, I've always had a clear direction with my work, and what I wanted it to be, but I never knew about fundamentals. I just kept drawing, following tutorials, and uninformed about anything that could boost my improvement. As a teen, I was ignorant of them, especially ala prima. What do you mean I have to draw naked people to improve? And what do you mean I have to hold the pencil a certain way?

Then I turned back to when I used to post on DeviantArt. An artist I used to know was successful in a way, and was making a pretty decent living. I reached out and found out they had a very accessible course with recorded and ongoing live classes. So, I decided to join them. This led to a very iconic phase of my life, where I met my mentors.

They were iconic and had a very bizarre story. They met at high school. He taught her to draw without being able to draw a single line. He also had editing skills (as a magazine and comics editor, not a video editor), no one knows where he got them. They had a lot of BS thoughts that I believe were formed by the romanticization of hustle culture, created by consuming anime and materials from the Japanese industry. Now they work for the industry. Because of her speed and style flexibility, she is sometimes contacted by the industry to rush work that some of the artists there were not able to finish. By now, she's probably a multi-millionaire artist, but she's not widely known. I still don't know whether to consider them successful or not.

They planted a lot of wrong ideas in my head about work, rest, and commissions. However, they helped me out a lot by giving me feedback. Thanks to them, I was able to make a living with only 300 social media followers.

At the same time, I met wonderful friends through that course who saved me countless times, and my boyfriend, who is also an illustrator. I was able to improve my work by studying the fundamentals, and right now, we keep supporting each other and improving together.

Right now, I'm nurturing a YouTube channel and making it one of the central pieces of my business growth. You can check it out here: Sayuui - YouTube

Thank you for reading so far. If you're interested in what my mentors taught me and want to become a full-time artist yourself, consider checking out my ebook, the fulltime artist roadmap!