Where the Pencil Leads

I still remember the first real art piece I ever made. I was eight, and it was a short fan fiction called Yoshi Stories — complete with a hand-drawn cover of Yoshi sweating through a long race. I had big plans to fill a whole notebook with his adventures and mishaps, but I only finished one story. Still, that one effort planted something deep in me: the foundation that art is a process and, more importantly, something that brings true joy.

This is a collection of drawings I made after Yoshi Stories and before I ever picked up a camera. It’s a look at the years when I was still figuring out what kind of artist I wanted to be. But I knew one thing for sure: I had to make art.