Hidden Talents

Some of you may or may not know that I have a little bit of a talent for drawing people. It's something that I started when I was around twelve, and my father did it a lot when I was growing up. I think that's where the interest derived from. I just kept working and working at it until I got to where I'm at now. I can't say that my work is anything impressive right now, but it's a lot better than 10-11 years ago.

I started out as most artists do: My parents bought me a sketch pad for Christmas to kick it off. I then bought "teeny-bopper" magazines (or rather Mom did after much prodding from me), and I'd draw several pictures a night of everyone from Brad Renfro and Devon Sawa to Neve Campbell and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. Needless to say, they weren't anything terrific as I only spent about 15-20 minutes on each. I got frustrated because I couldn't draw anyone whose mouths showed teeth as they smiled. Instead of tackling the problem, I'd just draw a closed smile.¹ I always got so frustrated with my drawings (I still do), and I'd have to walk away to keep myself from ripping the paper up.

Through art class in 7th grade, I delved into the wonderful world of shading. While my teacher tried to tell me how you're "supposed to" shade on a drawing, I did my own thing, and to this day, it works for me. I've just tweaked my method here and there along the way. At one point, we had to do a portrait of someone, so I asked my sister if I could draw her. You can always expect brutal honesty out of a twelve-year-old for something like this, so I got plenty of constructive criticism on that one.² I tried my best shading job on that, but it ended up looking choppy.

All through high school, I continued to take art classes, and I had to fight my art teacher my senior year to prove that I was responsible and independent enough to take studio art (you needed the teacher's permission to be enrolled in that class). I finally convinced her on the promise that I would come up with my own projects regularly. It sure seems like I had to do a lot of fighting to prove myself in high school, huh?
Anyway, I was able to come up with several projects to work on, and I liked having the freedom to continue to work on my hobby without someone telling me what to draw. That had to be the best class Iroquois had to offer for me.

Over my teenage years, my drawing skills improved more and more. I began perfecting my shading and drawing different parts of the body. I used to have trouble with noses and mouths, and now I love drawing them because they're challenging each time I draw someone new. People used to ask me if drawing hair was really difficult (you wouldn't believe how many people). Honestly, that's the easiest part to draw. All it is is coloring and shading. As long as you can see the different shades in someone's hair and the direction it's going in on each part of their head, and you can translate that to paper, you'll have no problem drawing hair.

In my senior year of high school, one of my parents' friends bought me an 18X24" sketch pad, which was quite the upgrade from the 11X14" pad I'd been using. I'm still using that pad today, and I'm able to draw much larger pictures. Now everything I draw (that I finish, I might add) eventually ends up in a frame and is hanging up on the walls in my house. I've uploaded a few to Flickr if you want to browse through. They're not the best photos as the drawings are in frames, and they're far too large to scan.

Right now I'm working on a picture of Arnold (as you can see at the top of this post) for my husband. I still need to make quite a few tweaks to his face before I move on because I know I have some proportional mishaps going on in there. Unfortunately, this picture has been sitting dormant for several weeks now. I really need to finish it. I haven't even drawn his huge chest, and that could probably be considered the highlight of the entire drawing.

Now I'm left to decide if this is something that I could go further with or not. The only problem I have is that I can only draw when I feel inspired to. At any other time, I get extremely frustrated. My husband knows because he remembers what happened with my Tom Cruise drawing. I'm not sure if it's something that I can force myself to do anyway and I'd get better or if I'd grow to hate it by forcing myself. I'm not sure I want to take the risk. What do you guys think?

¹I, of course, learned how to draw teeth eventually, and I have a lot of fun with the challenge.
²She didn't like the way I drew the dip between the top of her lips and her nose. She claimed it looked like a mustache. I guess I couldn't disagree with her on that one.