Getting Started

I'm weird. I admit that freely.

There are only a few times in my life that I can pinpoint the actual genesis of a major life decision. Interestingly, all the ones that come to mind revolve around art. I can tell you the moment I fell in love with the violin and decided to make it part of my life (first week of 6th grade when the orchestra teacher played hers for us kids). I can tell you when I got hooked on science fiction (I saw the novel Jurassic Park in my local Wal-Mart when I was ten and realized that the movie I loved was based on a book).

And while I've always been fascinated by good drawing and painting skills, I can tell you exactly when I decided to Make It A Thing™.

Just before this past Thanksgiving, a video from SamDoesArts popped up in my YouTube feed. No idea why. I had not been looking up art stuff on YouTube or elsewhere. I don't remember what video it was, but I thought Sam was funny and had some skills. So I decided to do a little research on SamDoesArts (aka Sam Yang) and I found this:

No matter what's going on with my day, looking at this just makes me feel a little bit better. When I first saw this, I thought, "yep, just found my new hobby."

Of course, I didn't do anything about it right away. Life gets in the way and all that. I finally had a chance to slow down at Christmas and start trying to figure out how to learn to draw. And then I found DrawABox. It's free, which was perfect for me since I didn't know yet that I really wanted to take this journey. And the lessons start with the fundamentals of drawing: making marks on paper.

Here's some of my DrawABox homework, the only such stuff I will include here because it is so boring to look at. I was pleased to find that the actual drawing assignments were not boring.

And thus my art journey began.