Drawn Together

After years of not indulging any of my creative arts drives, I decided to pick up drawing again.  I think like most children, I did a fair amount of doodling.  Most of my drawings as a child centered around either ninjas or soldiers.  I continued doodling on notebooks through high school, mostly when I was bored in class, but my I recall my folders being covered in some sort of artwork.  Then, when I moved on to college, I abruptly stopped.  It wasn't a conscious decision, and college lectures certainly weren't more compelling than high school ones, but I simply stopped.

Fast forward to late 2017.  I'm not sure why I decided to pick up drawing again - maybe it's because I was delving into guitar with some earnestness, or maybe some other compelling internal drive, but I decided to pick up some utensils and instruction materials.

At first, my expectation was to train myself to draw in realistic style - portraits, landscapes, animals, and the like.  However, after picking up a few starter books, I realized (at least for now) that I'm happy drawing simple representations and moving into the cartoon genre.  Even though the style lacks the realism that people generally associate with an expert artist, it can still convey a strong message.  As I improve, I don't know if I'll move to more realistic formats (I doubt it - in general, I favor the practical with some aesthetic value over beauty for beauty's sake), but I'm happy to have re-acquired enough basic skill in the past few months to draw some simple representations of people, animals, vehicles, and landmarks.  I'll know I've crossed an important threshold when I'm able to compose entire scenes and draw representations of existing people - either those in my life or celebrities that are recognizable, even if I don't fill in all of the shading details or include every wrinkle.

As a final note, I do plan on sharing some of my drawings here, but still haven't quite pulled together the nerve to advertise my new skill on such highly trafficked blog with such opinionated readers.