first exposure was like, kids cartoons and animated movies and stuff. like technically all the dinosaurs on Barnie are anthro animal suits, like u rly cant avoid furries in media generally. That being said, probably the most influential anthro/"funny animal" stuff for me was The Last unicorn, Spirit, looney toons, calvin and hobbes [and other newspaper cartoons], disney animal movies, that sort of thing. lady and the tramp and stuff.

When it comes to like Actual Real Furries like from the furry fandom specifically, i saw a couple ppl in fursuits at the local anime con and thought that was probably the coolest shit id ever seen at the time.

As for how i started drawing furry stuff: I've been pretty obsessively drawing animals my whole life, including fantasy creatures like dragons/unicorns and also like randomly splicing different animals together. i was also like MEGA into inu yasha when i was like 9-12. Followed a bunch of furry adjacent ppl on deviantart for a good long while and also was dating a furry in HS who sorta introduced me to the community. it was kind of clear to me at that point that furry porn was going to be my career path [this was both a correct assumption and a self fulfilling prophecy]

anyway THEN i got really seriously into closed species character design specifically and spent a good long while drawing stuff in closed species art roleplaying game communities [i even tried to make my own closed species but didnt have the skills or the reach at the time to really make that work. I also don't really enjoy all of the massive amounts of administrative work that goes into running a successful AARPG or CS, so i let that go in favour of just doing normal illustration out of financial necessity and also coming to grips with the fact that at the time i was not very skilled at character design.]

Thats about the time that i started really grinding my skills on illustration, made tons of really mediocre work for dirt cheap and clawed my way into some basic competence in digital art.

in terms of when i drew my Very First Furry tho, id say probs around like? 10 or 11 if you can count kemonomimis i guess? i kind of consider cartoon animals to be part of the overall anthro genre, as they often have human traits of some kind, kind of like how snoopy from peanuts is a little guy wiht opinions. and if thats the case then i suppose ive always been drawing furry stuff.