As surreal as it sounds, I have been a writer for over 25 years. While it’s speculative as to when it could transition from a hobby into a career, there has been some form of communication formed since I was a child, writing stories and eagerly consuming books. It can’t be argued that this makes me the best writer or even a prodigy, but what it can suggest is that I know my way around a paragraph, knowing how to form a greater thought and entertain the reader. Because of this creative endeavor that has consumed my life, one would assume that I’m a savant in other fields. Well, you’d be wrong.
To put it simply, I’m not an artist. It’s something I’ve long been envious of. Every time I see a drawing of certain accomplishment, I grow jealous. Whereas I can turn an empty room into this great psychological drama, I struggle to draw a human existing in their animated world. I can’t draw a face nor am I able to be capable of a convincing depth perception. While there’s something even more Mt. Kilimanjaro about painting, I am simply at a stage where I look at pencil-and-paper combinations and wonder why I can’t make something that captivating. Why can’t I draw shadows and create this illusion of greater existence?
In 2023, I made it a goal to try and draw more. While my initial run was met with management issues, I am hoping to pick things up this summer and eventually lead to producing something meaningful. As you can guess, I’m not expecting to make a masterpiece. I simply want to make my art more complicated, less stagnant, and definitive of a style that is visually appealing but also singular to how I want to create. There is no greater intent with this goal. I don’t want to submit art to galleries. I’m just someone who wants to challenge themselves to understand the framework for different modes of communication. If I haven’t made it clear elsewhere, my art (at least in my mind) pulls from different modes of entertainment in order to find something more interactive and engaging. In this case, I would like to imagine drawing teaches me patience as well as forces me to stop and admire environment. Because I will have to focus on drawing people, I will be more focused on things that my writing probably has lacked. Maybe it will make the prose more beautiful, a more vibrant exploration of colors and movement.
Which isn’t to say that the early run has been all that great. My perspectives are way off, and I’m left without a real sense of self. I don’t know what I want to draw. It’s a daunting task, but my hope is to get started.
Instead of breaking down some “art theory” that I clearly don’t have, I thought that I’d just begin by exploring my history with art, or more specifically drawing. It’s something that I feel was pushed on me in tandem with writing. However, whereas I found something lucrative in text, I wasn’t able to keep that interest in drawing. Maybe it was that as I got older, more talented cohorts put me off. I don’t know what it is, but I figure starting here will at least allow me to see where I can move forward.
Some of my earliest memories of drawing were from being 5-8. I can’t be too sure on the age, but it was also around this time that I was encouraged to write. Whereas I wrote to my Nana stories about anthropomorphic animals going on adventures (likely inspired by the popular “Wishbone” books of the time), I found cartoons to be more of a daunting task. Sure, I could scribble. My parents suggest that one day I took a black crayon and once colored an entire wall as a child. However, drawing is a more refined form of expression, and something that I think you eventually graduate to. You’re watching cartoons like Animaniacs or Looney Tunes and know that those look cool. Why not try and draw those?
Here’s where things began to get more nerve-wracking. The passion to draw was there. I wanted to create living, breathing creations. As a result, my parents would buy me these “How To” books that featured a lot of classic cartoons. I want to say they were Hannah Barbera heavy, though I can’t remember every face. With a sketch pad in my other hand, I was given pencils and encouraged to draw them. There was also this Disney CD-ROM I got where you learned to draw Mickey’s head, and that is where my first real moment of defeat emerged.
All of these books have the same hurdle. For me, a guestimation was always the best call. If I could be within the ballpark of the style, then I would consider it a success. Sure, this is a lot of pressure for a 5-8-year-old, but I think the intention was good. Like writing, you have to learn discipline, and art was not something that I had the patience for.
Let’s return to the Disney CD-ROM. The idea was that it would progress through the steps before finally animating it with movement. Sounds simple enough, but animators know what my downfall was. I didn’t have the patience to deal with the steps. I remember that CD-ROM very well because it wasn’t a simple three circle trifecta. In order to give your drawing dimension, you needed to draw the skeleton. It’s the frame that you would eventually erase and color over in order to make the drawing have a conventional attractiveness that seems easier said than done.
To give some insight into how I saw this CD-ROM assignment, I will provide an example. Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons where Marge takes an art class because she drew a portrait of Ringo Starr? There’s a scene where the teacher uses these highfalutin words as he sketches on a blackboard how to design a simple rabbit. There are rhombic shapes and all these convoluted lines. The joke is that it’s a pointlessly difficult way to draw something so mundane.
To me, Mickey Mouse’s head was that. As a child, I lacked the nimble hand necessary to draw one of the most iconic cartoon characters in history. Everyone knew Mickey Mouse, but I couldn’t get there without drawing the skeleton too dark. The curves were too obtuse. I would follow every instruction and not get anywhere near the goal. Then, in the ultimate moment of defeat, I watched as that mouse head came to life, moving up and down with a smile on its face. Looking at my chicken scratches, I think I was more dissuaded than thought of it as a sculpture that just needed time to shape properly. Same could go for the drawing books that I still own but have been pushed to the back of the closet.
Because of this, the idea of drawing like a pro was not in the cards. Maybe one day I would find a class that might convince me to change my ways, but for now, a prepubescent me would meet their first attack by The Mouse. This didn’t mean that I didn’t stop watching cartoons and wanting to draw them. I would create some sort of sketch for years to come, but there was always the sense that I wasn’t a serious artist. I couldn’t draw a skeleton. It would ruin the whole drawing. Even if I lightened my touch, I would not erase it properly. Nothing looked right.
The early run of cartoons that I drew was more driven by my interests at the time. I would draw animals in human clothes (possibly inspired by cartoons like Arthur and Busytown) and have them interact in ways not dissimilar from my stories. By fourth grade, I would sometimes get more ambitious. On one particular occasion, I actually attempted to animate the album cover for N*SYNC’s “No Strings Attached” and had it presented in class. Small things like having the teacher share proudly with a “Look what Thomas drew” sentiment was enough to make the whole ordeal feel validated. I can’t say it was good or that I even own it anymore, but it’s one of those teacher’s pet-esque moments that made me understand my general infatuation with school.
During this time, there was also a TV series called Pappyland. Whereas Mickey Mouse would prove too daunting for me, there was something about this PBS series that connected with me more. Whereas I remember it being called “Pappy’s Drawing Room” for some reason, it could just be that this part of the show resonated most. Pappy Drewit was a prospector type character who loved to draw. Every episode would find him encouragingly finishing his artwork by hanging his work on “The Hall of Frames.” I wouldn’t say they were the most complicated of art, but much like Bob Ross with adult painters, Pappy Drewit had this gentleness that made you able to feel like you were in a safe space. He’s the person who taught me how to draw a bird. They weren’t all that detailed, but the idea was to open the child’s imagination and turn our world into something colorful. The show would end in 1999 and I’m not sure how much cultural permanence it’s had on me beyond this detail, but it’s probably one of the few adult mentors who saw my artwork and actually made me think “Maybe I could do this.”
Which isn’t to say that people weren’t encouraging. It’s just that I never felt like I was as great as other people around me. Sure, I could figure out how to draw Winnie the Pooh or Pikachu, but I couldn’t show them playing frisbee. My work was largely inactive. Simple designs were a saving grace because I was never going to be that person drawing cartoonish portraits of people from a boardwalk kiosk. You know the ones with the way too big head that was big in the late 90s? Small things like that gave me an idea of what an artist could do, and I knew I couldn’t draw like that. I’d see Disney’s behind the scenes features for Aladdin (1992) or Tarzan (1999) and be confident that I was never going to make something that interesting.
With that said, my writing career did overlap with animation at another point. Had I been more persistent in this corner, I might be looking at a different trajectory of life. Because I had wanted to be a journalist earlier in life, I was keen on buying the newspaper every day. I would go back and forth from having a subscription to having to walk down to the newsstand with quarters in my pocket. I was so committed at a young age that I once got into a phone call with a Los Angeles Times subscription offer employee and lied my way into saying I was over 18 until it was time to give them credit card information. Because I was so eager to be on top of current events at such a young age, it meant I had access to a corner of the newspaper that I think used to have a bigger appeal to my generation.
I’m talking about the comics, a.k.a. The Funnies. While I wouldn’t say that I was able to stay on top of every ongoing storyline, it meant that I was familiar with these strips that I felt were some of America’s cherished touchstones. They were the place where you got to express ideas in their briefest and most entertaining ways possible. I’ll admit that I never understood 9 Chickweed Lane, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t read it. Others like Doonesbury, Herman, and The Boondocks made more sense to me. One of my personal points of pride was being aware of the exact moment that The L.A. Times first began publishing Frazz. I think because of that, it ended up being one of my favorites for a time. Sundays were of course ideal because they were glorified in color and blown up. Still, it was a nice little perk for dropping your 50¢ in the box. A little laugh after making sense of the daily news.
At no point could I believe that what I did next could’ve been serialized and made into a regular comic strip, but I think there was enough naivety to at least try. Plain and simple, I made a series of comics called Freakz. It was during a time when my writing was experimental. I created a superhero named Def Man who gained his powers by drinking soda and climbing buildings. I also wrote fan fiction for The Simpsons and Pokemon among other topics. For Freakz, it was something more mundane and akin to the strips that I read. They would just be two people looking at each other in a box and holding dialogue. I wouldn’t say anything about aesthetics would work to scrutiny, but I had a whole host of characters that I would rotate and there was something cathartic about it.
I think the parallel release of Dav Pilkey’s “The Adventures of Captain Underpants” was also helpful in encouraging this endeavor. While his later animated opus “Dog Man” would be more in line with how I drew, there was this awareness that children loved to draw and be crude, and here I was doing everything I could to foster my creativity. You had glimpses into their style and it was so encouraging. Far from the perfection of a Mickey Mouse head was this squiggly, imperfect look of a guy crashing into a wall. It’s a topic that would be considered crass, but I think has done more for encouraging kids to be creative than more concise attempts.
But that started me down a path of drawing people. I had this whole style formed by middle school. The chin would be oval and then I would put in a little extra work on the eyes and ears because I didn’t want them to be total cartoon. The only real struggle, and I’m sure many could relate to, was the hands. I think at a point I had it down, but now they’re back to looking like oven mitts. I can’t say their stories were great, but at one point I had a wedding scene where I used the joke “waffle-headed wife” and still think it’s a clever piece of wordplay.
Because of what age I was at this time, I think it was also the way that I experimented with other curiosities. While I was at best naïve about the human body, it didn’t stop me from drawing it in various ways. Sometimes it was simply to see what it looked like to draw breasts and hips. While I don’t believe I ever got to the stage where I was living out some perverse fantasy like certain contingents of comic book animators, there was still this idea that I was curious about sexuality and nudity. I drew every type of person naked at some point, designing things to fit a curiosity that I knew I couldn’t achieve elsewhere. I’m not sure how much was attraction, but the curiosity ran rampant, an eagerness to not limit myself. To some extent, I am still someone who is trying to find ways to discuss the human body without it being inherently sexual. To be completely honest, it’s one corner of my life that I wouldn’t mind exploring in more detail save for the fact that I was self-aware enough to throw out these drawings immediately out of shame of potentially being judged.
But to return to middle school. It wasn’t necessarily the peak of my drawing skills, but I do remember that my curiosity expanded into other directions. I was getting into a lot of music at the time, so the back of several notebooks was full of my take on band logos. This was likely inspired by these chintzy cut-outs from the back of Spin and Kerrang magazines where they had stickers for unique band logos. I thought they were cool so I tried to make them colorful and unique. Given that I mostly had markers at times, they were often smudgy and not the most attractive to look at.
But I also drew people still. I think it was where they were the most recognizable as people. Given that I was writing bad poetry about how I wanted to leave Catholic school at this time, there was a rebellion to it all. The dream of being an artist was rich. I noticed punk rockers who made their own artwork and sang their own defiant statements and found joy in that idea. With that said, I did once draw a classmate that grew increasingly embarrassing. It started decent enough, but I had screwed up the body proportions so much that I suddenly ended up drawing everything below the neck in black. I would say it turned out decent, but again I don’t believe I ever made a great piece of art.
This trend continued into high school, though it would become more private. I don’t think there’s anything significant to have been produced up until Junior year. This was in part because by that time I had joined the literary arts magazine and was encouraged to make my own entertainment. The conflict is that as much as I enjoyed that group and find those days to be some of the best I’ve ever had, I felt a bit distant in other ways. They listened to “different” music that I never placed. Many drew in this hyper-detailed way that feels reminiscent of a Tim Burton sketchbook. Given that I have been back to the campus in recent years, I’m surprised to learn that they still draw with the same macabre eye.
I was never wanting to draw something morose or Gothic. It wasn’t my style. Even as I earned respect for going my own way, I was still unable to connect with them in small ways. They were into truly abstract art. They discussed topics that I just could never connect with. Their poetry was too moody. I had no idea how to make art like that. I was comedic. However, the one note of pride I have is that I did manage to sneak a drawing of Yoda into a magazine once. I drew it on notepaper and thought that would be my style for the next issue. Instead, I mass produced a bunch of stuff that was criticized in the submission phase.
Elsewhere, I was drawing people I admired. This was often pulled from places like Entertainment Weekly where I drew Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory (2006) or Elliot Page in Juno (2007). Again, they weren’t the most active of sketches, but they were recognizable if you placed the sketch next to the real thing. By this point, artwork was a secondary part of my life compared to writing. I knew with my whole heart that I was going to be a writer. I was part of the literary arts magazine, the newspaper, even the yearbook. I knew my lane.
Which made it awkward that one of my final moments of high school involved taking an art class that was predominantly filled with Freshmen. To be completely honest, it was kismet of sorts as I met a lifelong friend in there. However, it was at that moment where I realized how at odds I was with the conventional sense of art.
Remember how the Mickey Mouse head struck me down as a child? Well, it came back in all of these unsuspecting ways throughout the class. While I had a great and supportive group of students around me, I personally struggled all over again to make art that fits the idea of “arty.” I want to say that I got a B on most assignments mostly because I tried and didn’t meet the teacher’s expectations. You wouldn’t think that it would be a class you’d be too crucially graded on, but it was a fairly intimidating endeavor. I remember one assignment about shading that I took very seriously that I got marked down on. There was little to be encouraged by. I made decent art, but again I was surrounded by people who had more of a knack.
Which isn’t to say that the class didn’t have its positives. The teacher beyond her grading scheme was very nice. She once dedicated a lecture to Banksy to show the value of street art. We even listened to his infamous CD where he switched Paris Hilton’s debut with a 30-minute loop of her saying “That’s hot.” We actually made it all the way to the end and became the only class to do so. All in all, it was one of those final moments where my art had any meaning in an academic setting. I would never take another class that centered around the subject.
As time went on, I think I just became more and more aware of people who drew better than me. By college, I was in classes with people who were passionate about becoming artists. They had access to tools I could never imagine. I was shifting a lot of focus over to writing. I was praised for it, and I think that it’s worked out in the long run.
Still, I look at other people who have these amazing drawings, sometimes not even complicated designs, and I admire them as much as I’m disappointed. I’m reminded of the days before I really knew how to draw where I took see-through paper and traced cartoons. I don’t know that I learned enough, but it’s the type of thing that I considered picking up again just because I want to know what it’s like to create something attractive. There’s people I knew in middle school who have gone on to teach high school animation, and I think that’s great.
In all honesty, I don’t know that I’m all that focused on art as a passion in the past decade of my life. I’m not out there exploring the new creators. At most, I remember a stopover at a museum in London in 2013 where me and Alex came out saying “Art is stupid.” I haven’t been to museums in that time to just look and admire craft. I’ve at most listened to faux intellectual discourse in films like American Hustle (2013) and nodded along in agreement. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds compelling. I would read Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” and wish I had some emotional attachment to a painting. She makes the very room said painting is in the most exciting place in the world. I would also recommend Museum Hours (2012) which gives even more depth of what it’s like to be there.
I’ve been watching the Art Deco YouTube page and enjoying the stories of talented artists throughout history. I think on some level, that’s what I’m more intrigued by… the story that they hide. Some of them are more interpretive, but I still am trying to feel connected to a visual form of expression that I sorely lack. Part of it is just wanting to branch out. I want to see the world as something greater. I would hate for everything to grow smaller as I grow older because that’s when it becomes claustrophobic, when it becomes uninteresting and I ultimately lose faith in myself. Art has been crucial to our existence, and I need to understand why. I don’t want to be a snob. I want to have everything enhance each other into some grander statement of what it means to be alive.
As Georges Seurat said in Sunday in the Park with George, “Art isn’t easy.” I can fully agree. I have tried and failed so many times to make what’s in my head come out on the page. There’s been enough to encourage me to continue exploring and trying, but otherwise, I’m left jealous of those who have the real talent. Then again, I admire them too. It takes a skill that wouldn’t be as interesting if everyone possessed it. The least I can do is try to understand where they started.
I’m hoping that I’ll begin drawing and form a habit that will build into something substantial. I thought my artwork 20 years ago was good. Just because it looks bad now doesn’t mean it will always be. I just need to try and remember why this matters to me and keep going for it. It’s time to see if I can see why this is a hobby that never blossomed into something greater. It’s low stakes, so if I say it’s good, it’s good. Colored pencils out. Sketch pad in hand. Let’s do this!
Comments
Post a Comment