For little old me, it might be cliche to say I have always liked drawing and I started it once I was able to hold a pen. But I would say I started to draw seriously in my late teens when I went to my first art school.

Also, I have always liked to draw my own characters and creatures. As a kid, I also liked to draw battling Pokemon haha, mostly pikachu electrocuting two other pokemon.

I remember my first art program (after ye olde PAINT) being like... Corel Paint Shop Pro or something like that? From there, I moved to GIMP, SAI, CSP and now I have settled with Procreate.

Oh i remember getting those old nickelodeon magazines and drawing in them for some of the activities when i was pretty young

I also used to just carry around note books in elementary and middle school and just draw in them all the time

My first art account online though was back in 2011 on dA at the ripe old age of 11 (which was breaking the rules 😭) but it led me to where i am now!

I believe I was just a year old, and I was only able to draw stick figures at the time, except if my tool was Microsoft Paint on that old Windows 98 desktop we used to have, then it was geometric shapes and airbrush garbage.
We actually got it replaced with yet another Windows 98 desktop that one of my parents got from work, the place they worked at still used 98 and XP, and had I have known that old versions of Photoshop would work on a 98 if it weren't for my friends telling me it was incompatible (of course, they didn't know), that could have been my first experience making art in a more advanced program, as low quality as it might have been back then. so I stuck with Paint for a while.
In the end, we replaced it with Windows 7 and I started making art in Gimp. Maybe I can share some of it here.

You wouldn't be the first. I was also just 11 years old when I made my first account, because I was too anxious to wait until my 13th birthday, and I really wanted to share my art with some of my friends from YouTube who also had accounts there. However, to quote a cheesy Dhar Mann video, I would "live to regret it", because I didn't realize people who liked to crap on young, beginner artists would even care about my old, childhood art, thinking they would just ignore it, and I ended up being bullied into giving them reactions, which eventually escalated into me deactivating my active account at the time. Of course, it didn't stop there, and I would be harassed for years, but the fires seemed to die down now. Either way, after my own experience, I actively advise minors against lying about their age to sign up for the sake of their own sanity.
To this day, people still get the chronological order of my accounts wrong; the one I'm most known for was created first, not the one I deactivated beforehand, and one of my so called "alts" which turned out to just be a coincidence in naming wasn't even mine, and it was created years before I even knew how to make an account, before I was even aware DeviantArt was a thing.

@Shadane

That truly was a wild and awful time on Youtube... I truly hope nothing like that will ever become a trend on Youtube again, so both beginner & young artists can just explore their style and interests in peace. I would say every artist has made something people would consider "cringe" at some point - and there's nothing wrong with it! It's part of growing up after all, and "cringe" is so last season!

My advice to every younger person is to just enjoy drawing and draw what makes you happy. Don't pay any mind to what people might think about it, their opinion doesn't matter and a big follower count doesn't make anyone's opinion important. If drawing your alter ego/sona with a canon character makes you happy, do it! If you like edgy characters. draw them!

As long as you don't hurt anyone with your art, draw whatever.

Man, I'm so sorry you had to go through that! I'm glad it's died down some though, and you can (hopefully) enjoy yourself online more without being bullied and pressured.

I'm so sorry you had to go through that! People are unneccessarily cruel to beginner artists, even now tbh. I also agree that kids need to stop lying about their age. But I'm glad that it's mostly died down for you now!

This!! So long as no one's getting hurt or it's not hateful content, cringe is dead do what you want! Self inserts, oc x canon, silly animation memes, etc. etc. Life's too short to take yourself too seriously 24/7, art is for people to express themselves!

Honestly, I still love edgy characters to this day, so I can only imagine how people who called my series on YouTube "2edgy4me" would react not only to finding out that I still draw scene, goth, punk, emo, and sk8r characters to this day, but the fact that I don't care what they think anymore, and keep doing it because it makes me happy. XD
I personally believe cringe culture died before it even truly began, and it was just an excuse to bully kids for not being professional artists or writers the second they put their pen to paper.

Me too. I only really ever drew and made animations for fun, and to this day, I still do it for me, my friends, and my loved ones over anything else. I would love to get a job in animation one day, but I feel like most animation companies are too strict, so I'd stand a better chance at opening my own animation studio. Yet still, people love to hate artists that draw edgy sparkledogs or sparklecats, mythical human-faced animals, Pokemon fan art, or OC x Canon pairings, probably because they're insecure about their own capabilities.

I started to draw when I was kindergartners

and back when I was joining deviantart in 2008, my older artworks are so bad, that I deleted it from deviantart for their scrappiness, and that's back when deviantart was better website than currently is

Like everyone else, I was pretty young, too. I don't know how old specifically, but I know there's a video of me drawing around 3. I also know one of my earliest memories was drawing Pink on a whiteboard after "Get The Party Started" came out when I was like 5/6.
I started drawing in an anime-ish style around 8 (Which is still really funny to me because I couldn't figure out the eyes and just drew squares most of the time). I think I started posting my art online at 11 in 2006? On deviantart, of course. (Joining DA too young gang rise up)
I didn't start drawing digitally until I was in HS in 2011/2012. SAI was the love of my life back then. Believe it or not, I didn't take art very seriously in HS, even though I got in trouble most often for drawing during class.
Honestly, I feel like I didn't even when I was in art school, but only after I left. It happens, I guess lol.

Another question for everyone here... Who else was gifted those How to draw manga-books? I'd a few of them, can't really say they really helped me to improve tho... But they were still fun!

I was a child when I started to draw. As the years rolled by, however, I stopped using paper.

I was 27. I'm 29 now and teaching others already, even people older than me.
When you started to draw has nothing to do with how skilled you are.

I was forced into science and brainy things so I didn't get to visual art but always liked art.
I think that was also because I was living with parents and they wanted me to focus more on work etc instead.
But also some of the things I wanted to draw they found childish so I didn't really pick up drawing until I got my own home.

I improved rapidly and can draw/paint literally anything I want without difficulties, my only barrier really is my energy and time.
I still don't have much time to do art though.

I was a small child that used to doodle on pieces of paper, now I’m 24 and I draw in paper and on a screen. I’m also addicted to drawing too, so yeah.
I think my art has changed for the better too, and I’m still proud of it.
(I was never given those how to draw manga books at all either, since I learned how to draw by myself since childhood.)

Big agree! And it's also never too late to start to draw. Nowadays there are so many good free resources to start learning and improving fast.

Art also isn't a competition, we all improve at our own pace and we should all encourage each other to keep going!

For me, I remember drawing my OCs in third grade. All I had back then was a Microsoft editor for PNG files, a scanner, and colored pencils.

When I look back at what programs I had back then compared to what I have now, it still amazes me how much progress was made in the digital doodling area.

I think I was 12-13? Started seeing the old youtube animators and started using ms paint. I really wanted to become like them.
I am 27 lmao, so yeah, still doing my best to improve every day. Backgrounds and perspective are always a huge pain.

since 4ever really, but i think i properly wanted 2 get better and all that around 10/11? and i started digitally when i was 12!

I honestly think I was born with a pen in my hand. It took forever for me to get good-ish at drawing, but I was doing it forever. I used to get in trouble for finishing my school work and tests before anyone else, then doodling all over the margins and blank backs of my papers while there was nothing else to do for the rest of the period. My teachers used to tell me it was unacceptable and I had to redo my work. So, I'd re-take my tests, and then start drawing on my arms. At home, I kept getting in trouble for drawing on the walls, in books, and on my clothes. I caught hell for it, ha.. back then, "discipline" was painful, to put it gently. Didn't care, though. I was having fun.

Indeed, if art was a competition, the whole of man and nature had already won.
You can only make more art, your own art, what you want to show or say with it, the intent and personal crafting element :3

I was maybe two or three. Mostly scribbles though. My first drawing that was good enough to not be considered a scribble was when I was school-age, and that was probably only because school tried to auteur it.

It took me at least that long to get good enough at drawing to say I accomplished anything.

I started to draw when I was 4 years old, I drew weird little stick figure girls haha. fun fact I did this before I knew how to write my own name !!