15th Dec 2010, 5:18 PM

Drawing

From kindergarten to fourth grade, I was known as The Artist. I ruled indoor recess with my drawings of dogs and horses on the chalkboard. I took pride in my 64 crayons, even though I only used like ten of those colors. In these five glorious years, the denizens of Brown Station Elementary School would come to me with their artistic woes "Tiffany, I don't know how to draw a cat. Can you teach me?" and I happily obliged. Though I was never really particularly good at drawing, I seemed to be the best at it up until fifth grade when this new kid happened. This new kid was from Japan. She blew everyone away with her manga-drawing skills and origami-folding shenanigans. It didn't really phase me until this one kid was like, "Hey! Jackie draws better than you!" Then, I just felt....bad.

Jackie became one of my best friends. She taught me how to draw the manga way and I did so for a couple of years after that. Then, around the time of high school, I stopped drawing. I figured, I didn't really like drawing that much anyway, not as much as sculpting at least. Drawing stopped being fun for me. I thought of it as a chore because my sculpting teacher would require a certain number of sketches per week. I hated it.

This attitude more or less stayed with me for the rest of high school with perhaps a shift towards indifference over the years. In college, I took a couple of drawing classes and was pretty surprised at how well I could draw still-life. Apparently, the fear of getting less than an A in a college art class really brought out the best in me. Now my attitude was more like "Hey, I can actually draw! Cool. " but I still wasn't like "Hey I have some free time. I'm gonna draw something!!" because drawing still wasn't really "fun" to me.

Then one day, for some reason, I tried to be funny. I was probably in desperate need of procrastination. I drew some comics, showed them to friends, and they thought my comics were funny. I never really considered myself a funny person, but I embraced my newfound method of procrastination and just started drawing lots of comics. Sometimes I struggled due to lack of drawing practice. Sometimes I found myself cracking up pathetically at my own comics. It's almost as bad as laughing at your own jokes, but slightly better because usually I'm just laughing at the drawings. Really.

Anyway, I am happy to say that through comics, I finally found a way to enjoy drawing. :)

Cheers,

Chuey