Editing Carl Barks (section)

===Professional artist===
At the same time Barks had started thinking about turning a hobby that he always enjoyed into a profession: that of drawing. Since his early childhood he spent his free time by drawing on any material he could find. He had attempted to improve his style by copying the drawings of his favorite [[comic strip]] artists from the newspapers where he could find them. As he later said, he wanted to create his own facial expressions, figures and comical situations in his drawings but wanted to study the master comic artists' use of the pen and their use of color and shading.

Among his early favorites were [[Winsor McCay]] (mostly known for ''[[Little Nemo]]'') and [[Frederick Burr Opper]] (mostly known for ''[[Happy Hooligan]]'') but he would later study any style that managed to draw his attention.

At age 16, he was mostly self-taught but at this point he decided to take some lessons through correspondence. He only followed the first four lessons and then had to stop because his working left him with little free time. But as he later said, the lessons proved very useful in improving his style.

By December 1918, he left his father's home to attempt to find a job in [[San Francisco]], [[California]]. He worked for a while in a small [[publishing house]] while attempting to sell his drawings to newspapers and other printed material with little success.