In the description of my most recent submission (the Vera T-shirt sketch), I mentioned that it was the first time in my life I had ever enjoyed drawing. I had wanted go to into more detail as to why I used to hate it, but I didn't want to write a long story in the description. This journal has that story, for anyone who wants to read it.

I was never the kind of kid who doodled, so it wasn't until middle school that I was really exposed to art, and that sadly happened in a public school classroom. I had art class twice a week: the first period was for general art stuff and the second was for long-term projects. My teacher was a small, leathery old woman who was really out of touch with kids. She would often ramble about paint texture, form, line, depth, or something else, but she may as well have been talking to herself.

The job of a teacher is to impart knowledge to students. I don't think I learned a single thing in the two years she taught me art.

The project I remember most was drawing wooden duck figures, which we did in groups with our desks clustered together and a figure in the middle. Every other art class I was hunched over my desk, glancing between a wooden duck figure and my blank piece of paper, wondering why the lines I was drawing didn't look like the duck. I would spend minutes just trying to draw a line that was meant to trace the outside of one wing, erasing and retrying and not having any idea what the fuck I was doing.

What bothered me more was the false sympathy I got from the teacher. When she walked near my desk and saw a mostly blank piece of paper, she would invariably lean in way too close, put her hand on my shoulder, and say something like "oh that's a great start!"

It wasn't a great start. I had barely drawn anything. Weeks had gone by and some of the other students with a knack for art had moved onto colouring, but I was still sitting there grinding away at nothing. I knew that everyone else got it, and I knew that I was missing something, but I didn't know what it was.

Now that I'm an adult, I would approach a situation like this confident and eager to learn from my failures - but I wasn't an adult. I was a kid in middle school with poor grades who was having trouble in other classes. The duck drawing was something I was being marked on, and that meant there was a 100% correct way to do it, and if you did the work 100% correctly then you got a mark of 100%. I didn't know how to do it and the teacher never told me, but somehow everyone else seemed to get it. It didn't make sense.

I grew to genuinely hate art class, and at one point I remember pulling out a book I was reading (The Count of Monte Cristo - yes, really) and being told to put it away and focus on the lesson. This type of situation is what I despise about the public school system in North America: any kind of artistic expression or oddness is ground into paste and fed into a marking rubric. It's nice that you to want to read four grade levels above yourself, son, but the system says you need to get your daily allotted Artist Enrichment™ for the next 45 minutes so shape the hell up and get your pencil crayons.

Anyway.

The reason I've been thinking about this so much recently is that a friend of mine, Outlet, enjoyed Brain Freeze and Hot Water so much he offered to draw me a sketch request of my choice. I had a general idea, but rather than describe it in words I thought it would be simpler if I made a little MSPaint scribble to show the general pose idea.

Drawing that one little scribble was one of the most gut-wrenching things I can remember doing in the last decade. Every bad memory about that middle school art class came rushing back, and my chest and shoulders were clenched tight while I tried to draw some stupid little sketch lines with the pencil tool. Actually sending the picture was like putting my hand into a meat grinder. "Yeah, I think it's really hot when you draw furry chicks getting eaten by giant snakes. Could you draw some fetish filth just for me, please?"

I felt like I had this sound of clanging metal and breaking glass in my head that drowned out every other thought. Who was I to ask this? How the hell did I expect my drawing to be any good? Why bother? Don't I know I'm a fucking terrible artist?

But ultimately I did send the picture, and it made sense along with my description. Outlet is a very nice guy, so of course he got it. I told him a bit about what had happened, and he was supportive, naturally. I think the nagging, you're-doing-it-wrong thoughts all bubbled up from my subconscious mind that day. It was like I had finally let go of the tension I had been holding since I was a kid.

The Vera T-shirt sketch isn't really much in the grand scheme of things - but for me, it was the first time in my entire life that I had picked up a pencil without feeling like I was doing something wrong.

Thank you very much if you read all of this. I don't normally blogpost, but my decision to take up drawing has been a pretty important moment in my life. If only all of life's problems could be solved by snake chicks with big boobs.