Drawing had been a big part of my life growing up, I liked to draw nature scenes, perspectives and portraits, as well as design concept airplanes that I often converted to blueprints and build R/C flying models from. As life went on I moved into computer programming and digital graphic design and my old pastimes of drawing faded.
Along came Steemit.
In my early days on Steemit I really enjoyed taking part in the many drawing and photography contests that were offered. They gave me a chance to dust off some old skills, interact with others on the platform and get to know a lot of great people. Before the whale wars, flag wars, and debates over upvote bots pulled everyone apart, this was a time of unity and community pulled me into Steemit.
I didn't know it at the time, but this was the beginning of my journey that would lead me to where I am now, helping to manage the various endeavours of the BeyondBitcoin communities.
Some of my drawing were for weekly contest where we were required to draw from a series of examples images. These were often very challenging as I had to push myself to focus and bring back skills I hadn't used in over 14 years or so.
In time I decided to blend the different skill level images together into collages to make a more interesting final drawing even though that would disqualify me from the contest itself. To be honest, by this time I was just happy to know I hadn't lost my ability to draw.
One of my favorite drawing contests was for the "Whaleshares Court" where we were asked to draw the community leaders in a fantasy roll based on the nicknames they had been given in discord.
By this time I had also come to the realization that rendering in color pencils was very challenging and often smudged out the smaller details of my drawings like faces and hands. Frustrating, but something I had to push through.
I created my rough sketch soon after the contest was announced, then went to work bringing each character to life.
His Royal Highness, Walrus the Wizard King 
A the time I didn't know much about the community yet and had no idea how significant the symbolism of Fuzzy's coins dropping from his pouch would be. I later found out he created the first ever cross-chain tokens called WHALESHARE and BEYONDBIT that are used to fund projects, events, and reward people for helping to support others in the community to this day.
I definitely enjoyed my first months on Steemit taking part in all the awesome drawing and photography contests. It allowed me to grow with the community here and meet a lot of really great people... a path that lead me to Whaleshares and my role in the BeyondBitcoin and EOSTalk communities.
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