Frank, how did you get so good at drawing?
There are a few reasons. One is that I used to draw a lot as a kid, though I stopped before puberty because I figured drawing things was weird. And then as I grew up and started having artistic hobbies as a teenager I made a point to keep drawing.
The other reason is that I studied computer graphics for a while and took a course in college where we were told to draw things on a blackboard, which I really enjoyed. It got me used to having to make my models look good (a skill I still need to cultivate)
My final two reasons are pretty funny. One was that when I was taking geometry classes in college my prof told us to just draw things on the blackboard, so I did a bunch of times. Eventually this became a habit. I also had another professor in that same course, whose name, in retrospect, I don't remember but who was very good. (One day she was teaching an overview of basic computer graphics algorithms to a larger class and I was hanging out and watching and she gave me a "you need to learn to do these yourself because they're cool and important" kind of look.) Heh.
The last is more serious: in college I did a bunch of drawing classes for fun (including the one where we drew on blackboards), but there were also some classes where I drew a bunch of 3D art. I didn't have a drawing tablet back then but the way I learned about what a drawing tablet was like, and then about how to learn to use one, was by looking at some art class (drawing with a stick on black paper) that was done with a tablet and going to the art supplies store and just playing around with the art-supplies-store version of a tablet to see how it worked. I was fascinated with how this was the sort of thing you could learn to do by just thinking about drawing on a piece of paper. The store owner and I eventually got into a long, very friendly argument about whether drawing paper was preferable to drawing tablets – it didn't really matter to me since I wasn't going to get a tablet anytime soon (as it turned out later I was really good with a pen and paper), and she was in some kind of middle school class where the school's curriculum was written to accommodate students in that class (or something) and couldn't see any benefit to paper so she preferred it, but I didn't want to give up any advantages of using paper, so I felt I should stick with it – there were other factors of course (I got this way of thinking because my mom had a degree in art history and had a lot of paper-heavy art history classes in college; I had always been curious about art history and the kinds of questions paper-heavy art classes asked), but I was interested in this kind of question even if it wasn't the important thing – and she finally agreed with me (and I suspect she eventually went back to paper because she liked it better)
(Of course these days I like a drawing tablet because it feels much better to work with than a pen, and my computer's graphics system has better support for drawing tablets than my mouse. But then, I only used it for a few months before getting tired of that and just switching back to a pen. If my mouse had better 2D drawing support, maybe I'd still be using the tablet)
