Classification: Prose
Theme: Autobiography
Synopsis: An autobiography explaining my on-and-off hobby for art, and also my progress.
…
This was a real-life story told from my perspective. The actual writer.
I was not only a writer but also an artist on the side, a sketch artist to be specific, I tried and draw as much as I could and balanced both at the same time. But as much as I loved to draw I only consider it to be a hobby, unlike writing.
I was not quite sure when I started to draw but, I think it was in 3rd grade when I was 9. I gained the hobby from an old friend who always drew in class so I supposed I wanted to do the same.
I did like to draw to the point where I would hang up my sketches on the wall. I didn't know why, but I strayed away from that hobby and stopped drawing for the rest of the year. And then I went on to 4th grade. I met another old friend who also liked to draw, and at that time I was surrounded by close friends who were also artists, so I decided to draw again. Looking back at it the "drawings" I made were extremely bad, no wonder why my other classmates teased me for it.
I thought back then, art for me was just for passing my time and I would only draw in my unused sketchbook if I ever felt like holding a pencil. I wanted to practice but I never did it, I didn't know why, I just had this refusal to practice.
Another year passed and as much as I could remember I didn't do much in 5th grade. That was when the writer side of myself started to shine more.
And then, 6th grade, my last year of elementary. A few months into school a friend of mine recently started watching anime and it was all she could talk about. The anime was “My Hero Academia.” Eventually, I decided to give it a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was the first anime I'd ever watched.
My imagination then started flickering and I created my own character, or an OC, in the anime, giving it a plot and a backstory, but I never drew what the character looked like, you see I had this game where you could create your own chibi characters and instead of sketching out the character I created it in the game. You may think this had absolutely nothing to do with my on-and-off art hobby but it does.
That one mere character itself inspired me to create more characters in different animes and eventually create my own original stories where every character and plot was created by me, and keep in mind, at this time I had completely ghosted art. I was already a full-on writer but I never wrote down any of my stories nor did I ever thought of myself as a writer, I only kept my stories and fan fiction in my head until a year or so ago, I decided to actually write. Allthough I didn't write OC-inserted stories anymore.
I wasn't drawing the characters but I created them in the same game and I would request the same friend who introduced me to anime to draw some of my characters because she was also an artist. She would draw them and I would receive the finished product. I would always be satisfied with the results. The reason why I needed my characters to be drawn was that I needed a clear appearance of the actual character to make it easier to imagine them.
I didn't know what was stopping me from drawing, I knew how to decently draw but I never did hold a pencil nor even tried to sketch out my characters. I felt envious of my friends and others who could draw beautifully and wished that I could be like them, I never practiced because I thought I would never improve, so what was the point of doing so? Until recently I found out the reason why I never tried. It was because I just didn't want to.
And then the lockdown came during the year 2020. I was twelve, turning thirteen at that time, and was now embracing my inner writer but still ignoring the artist in me. I couldn't seem to remember why, but I asked my mom to buy me a sketchbook. Then, I had finally decided to try out art again, because I started to push myself more and more to practice. I drew random and simple images from Google, it was a good start but I still refused to draw my characters since I knew it would turn out absolutely hideous. I didn't realize I was just too scared to try. I was too scared to fail.
One night I was bored and decided to doodle. I ended up doodling a half-decent "portrait" of one of my characters. I still had the sketch and looking at it now, it was surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be. It pushed me to draw more characters and in a blink of an eye, I was, all of a sudden, improving. I didn't know how I hadn't drawn a single person in like two years and then when I started sketching again, it turned out decent. That was when I was certain that I was too much of a coward to draw a person.
I drew more and more of my characters before the dreaded time came when I lost my motivation and stopped drawing for six months straight. I would walk past my sketchbook and not draw in it. Why did I stop? I honestly didn't know. I just lost so much motivation. I wasn't scared to draw people anymore but I still stopped. It was like history was repeating itself. And like before, I started drawing AGAIN during the month of June and another time around September. The sketches I drew were surprisingly good and better than last time, what confuses me was how I got better and better after not drawing for several months.
That was when I decided to finally practice my art. If I wanted to be a good artist then I couldn't just sit around and wait for my next wave of motivation to draw something. If I didn't exercise my hands and muscle memory, my art skills would just fade away, and I wasn't willing to let that happen after pushing myself so much to try.
My parents bought me a new sketchbook last month and it was already almost full because of how much I'd been drawing. Now I could confidently say that I'd drastically and very much improved in my skills. I was not the best (and will never be) at drawing but for someone who hadn’t touched a pencil in a long time, my progress was rather impressive, to say the least.
During my experience, I had learned that being too scared to try something existed, but I supposed if you just push through and stopped waiting for something to happen, you would end up with something good.
Published by: Aira Lindsay Dela Cruz
Date Published: November 29, 2021
Time Published: 8:04 PM
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