Anyone who knows me could tell you that I have never had a problem finding things to be interested in. Rather, my problem is that there are a lot of things that I like, and I'm good enough at a lot of them that I end up wanting to do everything! That's how I ended up having two majors and a minor in college (two of the above were music and math, but I keep the third secret online to retain at least a semblance of privacy—rest assured, it certainly wasn't art). Since my graduation from college, I have continued to learn things on my own. My first project was learning to write fiction. Drawing is now my second project, and this has certainly come as a big surprise.
To explain why I'm so surprised to be drawing, I have to back up several years. For those who don't know, I was homeschooled all the way through high school. We did do a bit of art in elementary school. We used Berry Stebbing's and Mark Kistler's books for a little while each, and then there was a curriculum whose name I can't recall that involved stacking foam blocks and drawing them on isometric dot paper. This latter was the only one that appealed to me (possibly because, like math, there was only one right answer, and there was a definite path toward finding the answer). Anyway, despite this smidgen of artistic experience, I didn't think of myself as someone who could draw at all (with the exception of isometric shapes constructed from rectangular prisms).
Sometime in my early teens or pre-teens, I remember considering whether I should invest time in learning to draw. This time would of course have to come out of the time I spent doing math, or knitting, or reading, or cooking... I considered how much time I would have to invest in order to get anything rewarding out of art, and decided it wasn't worth it. I would leave art to my dad and sister, and concentrate on the subject areas where the work-to-payoff ratio was higher.
Through all of high school and college, I never really thought about art. There were so many other things that I was interested in, and basically I was just relieved to at least have narrowed the field down by one subject that I was never going to study. (There were so many more things that I wanted to study in college than I had time for...if cost considerations hadn't limited me to five years, I might have picked up another major or minor.) I certainly admired people who could create art, but I never considered doing so myself; I had ruled that out.
Then a couple weeks ago, I was browsing fan art (of Sherlock, if you must know) and I was struck by the way some artists could capture a person and make his or her face recognizable with only a pencil and paper. Suddenly, I really wanted to be able to do something like that with a pencil. Even if I couldn't create a specific recognizable face, perhaps I could at least create something that was recognizable as a human face.
I just couldn't stop thinking about drawing after that, and I decided to give it a try. I'm going to focus my efforts solely on trying to learn how to draw faces in pencil, and hopefully I'll see some improvement in my artistic ability. Since I'm not following any step-by-step curriculum, I wanted a way to keep track of what I've done and what I have yet to do, and that's why I created this blog.
