How Has Steem Impacted My Life || My journey of steem through ART

This post is in response to @theycallmedan ‘s initiative requesting stories about how we’ve been personally impacted by Steem.

I joined steemit 2 years and 5 months ago. I learned about it on facebook. At first when i heard about steemit and learned that you can make money by liking and commenting on posts, I was sure that this was a scam. So, at first i kind of ignored it. But then a group of people started steeming seriously and I had to browse through, so i did.

I was still not sure whether this was a scam or not but when i learned that making an account takes time, i became interested. Because some scam site won't want their users to wait 3-5 days for an account.

I signed up for an account and i had to wait about 4 days to get my mail approved and set up my account. At first i made mistakes. I made weird shitty posts and went around making tiny comments on other people's posts. Obviously I wasn't getting much upvote so i stopped posting or commenting for a few days and just read about this whole platform from other people's posts.

I learned a little and decided to post about art. I wasn't really that good at art back then. I used to sit down with simple paper and pencil and draw faces that looked super bad but i did that because i enjoyed that. I found a few other people posting about art and getting huge upvotes even though their arts were 100 times worse than mine. Later i learned those were just some scammer who were abusing the system by shitposting and upvoting their own posts.

These are some of the arts that i made before i was introduced to steem

Anyone can tell that the quality of these are the worst. Even though these were bad I started getting a little bit of support once in a while and so i thought if i can post better art works may be i will get more support.
After my first or second withdraw from steem i used the money to buy some quality art supplies(papers and pencils mostly). Then i really got into art. I started watching youtube tutorials so i can learn better.

After a few weeks i was making this kind of art works

steem price went really high at this point and so i thought about stepping up my game. I started spending more and more time behind art.
Before i used to take 30 minutes or an hour for a drawing and the result wouldn't be that good but now with good amount of money coming out from my art, i was short of free from worrying about anything. So i started putting days into my artworks and got better support at them.

I started practicing more and more and my pencil art skills kept going up.
these are my best pencil work till now:

Then i was introduced about digital art and i was instantly in love with it. Because there was a good amount of money still coming from steemit, i didn't hesitate to spend some more money to buy my very first graphic tablet.

Of course i wasn't good at digital art at first. I still am not but i am better at it than before.
here are some old art works

I stopped focusing on it for a while and then all the whales started to curate posts manually and i got back to posting my art works again.

Here are some of the new art works:

These are also the best works of me till now.

I am showing all of these because I improved this much only because of steemit. You would think i could have improved anyway, but not really. That's not how anything would have turned out.

The place where i live and the environment that i grew up in, people wouldn't say that art is something you can make a career out of. It would be some short of a laughing stock. Parents are not really that supportive towards any career that is not doctor or engineer..... Or something else.
I couldn't have come this far because i wouldn't be able to support myself by only drawing all day every day. But that was possible because of steemit.
I didn't even know that i had this talent and i would never have known if steemit didn't happen to me.

I have done so many things in the past two years that i never thought i could have done. This is how steem impacted my life. If i wasn't on this platform, i would be doing something that i wouldn't truly like and which in time would have sucked the life out of me.

I am still trying to figure out my life and what i want to be or do in the future and steem is making it a lot easier for me.

I am so grateful that i am a part of this