As a child? I hadn't been expecting that XD. Thanks for the question - I had to think about it for a moment, but it's great fun.
As a child, I had three great inspirations: Ancient Egypt, Robin Hood and the legends of the Round Table (and the Middle Ages in general) :D. The first time I drew a comic, I was twelve and had just seen Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which I adored. The comic a Mary Sue (Robin of Locksley's cousin), a Gary Stu, the Count of Flanders, a dog named Ramses (who was a kind of Egyptian god in disguise) and Morgan le Fay as the villain. As you can see, it's not so much writers that inspired me - rather, it was history/legend and then all things I could connect to it, whether they were novels or films or comics.
I devoured comics as a child (and still do :P), and when I think back to the point where I started to draw more than, or differently from, my friends and classmates, I always used comics as examples.
The first comics artist I started to copy was Lucien De Gieter, whose series Papyrus (http://www.egypteinedite.be/papyrus01.htm) I adored. It was about Ancient Egypt (my favourite period in history when I was ten) and the early De Gieter characters had huge eyes and cute faces. In terms of layout and storytelling I based myself on my favourite series, Suske & Wiske (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_and_Suzy). Shortly after, I discovered Wendy Pini's Elfquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfquest) which became a major influence (again, large eyes and cute faces :P).
Outside of comics, I taught myself to draw at the hand of a book of fairytales illustrated by Edmund Dulac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Dulac) - a result of my father starting to buy me classic fairytale books and forbidding me to read comics until I'd finished the fairytales :P. I also had a facsimile of an old Dutch retelling of Mallory's Arthur, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (and in which all the pictures got attached to the wrong stories somehow XD). I can safely say that Rackham taught me how to texture trees *g*.
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As a child, I had three great inspirations: Ancient Egypt, Robin Hood and the legends of the Round Table (and the Middle Ages in general) :D. The first time I drew a comic, I was twelve and had just seen Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which I adored. The comic a Mary Sue (Robin of Locksley's cousin), a Gary Stu, the Count of Flanders, a dog named Ramses (who was a kind of Egyptian god in disguise) and Morgan le Fay as the villain. As you can see, it's not so much writers that inspired me - rather, it was history/legend and then all things I could connect to it, whether they were novels or films or comics.
I devoured comics as a child (and still do :P), and when I think back to the point where I started to draw more than, or differently from, my friends and classmates, I always used comics as examples.
The first comics artist I started to copy was Lucien De Gieter, whose series Papyrus (http://www.egypteinedite.be/papyrus01.htm) I adored. It was about Ancient Egypt (my favourite period in history when I was ten) and the early De Gieter characters had huge eyes and cute faces. In terms of layout and storytelling I based myself on my favourite series, Suske & Wiske (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_and_Suzy). Shortly after, I discovered Wendy Pini's Elfquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfquest) which became a major influence (again, large eyes and cute faces :P).
Outside of comics, I taught myself to draw at the hand of a book of fairytales illustrated by Edmund Dulac (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Dulac) - a result of my father starting to buy me classic fairytale books and forbidding me to read comics until I'd finished the fairytales :P. I also had a facsimile of an old Dutch retelling of Mallory's Arthur, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (and in which all the pictures got attached to the wrong stories somehow XD). I can safely say that Rackham taught me how to texture trees *g*.