There are a lot of Internet relics from my childhood that are long gone, but amazingly, Creative Uncut isn't one of them.
When it came to drawing, I didn't have much to learn from growing up. We didn't have internet for the longest time, so a lot of my exposure to "outside art" was through video games (and their instruction manuals), monthly issues of Nintendo Power (after I convinced my mom to order them for me), how-to-draw books from the book fair and book order, and the manga and comics that my friends would trade and lend to me (I can't tell you how many times I've read the first volume of One Piece because it was the only volume we had at our elementary school lmao)
And when we finally did get consistent internet around 2008-2009 (give or take, my memory's foggy on that one lol) it was shitty backwoods satellite internet, the kind that would turn a 20 minute episode of Naruto into five minute 360p segments that took an hour each to load. And this was before the days of Youtube tutorials and Instagram influencer courses. Tutorials were still around, of course, but for the most part, you had to hunt them down yourself, and that meant a lot of digging around DeviantArt, DragoArt, online forums, and whatever our shitty internet could load through Youtube.
So sites like Creative Uncut were like a goldmine of resources that blew my preteen mind. It was a whole new world beyond my how-to-draw books and video game instruction manuals. I used to spend hours upon hours on this site in junior high / high school, finding art from my favorite games and even art from games I'd never played before but just loved to find and look at in awe. I used to keep my own backup folders of the art I never wanted to lose, the art I wanted to learn from.
I owe a lot of my artistic journey, however long and "behind" it's always felt, to the treasure trove of art on this site, and the efforts of the site's team that made it available to me in the first place.
So getting to revisit it for the sake of my HADES art study this month has really been healing my inner child and bringing me a certain memorable joy I had almost forgotten about. I'm glad it's still around to keep helping me today like it did back then <3
