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There was a time when all my art was in a hyper-realistic style, and I leaned heavilly towards pencils, ink, and charcoals. Obviously, that time has passed. I just got so very bored with it.

Somehow, I don't really remember how, but I was young and I think CLAMP might have been partly at fault --specifically, I think scans of RG Veda were at fault-- I started doing heavily stylized anime-esque work. The fact that I don't really work very well without some sort of model for inspiration led me quickly into fanart.

Frequently I hear this genre derided as either plagarism, or, at best, utterly non-creative. And I cannot deny that I envy people who can just sit down and put pencil to paper with nothing but their mind to guide them. Howsoever that may be, I do not and likely never will see how what I do differs substantively from working from life. The portrait artist is drawing what he sees before him.

Today I work almost exclusively in a combination of colored pencils and ink. I do no digital manipulation at all, except to remove grevious errors (ink blots, or the like), resize the image, and, in the case of any picture largely orange, touch up the color. My scanner hates orange.