Unlike many very talented and very fortunate artists that I've come across, I wasn't born with a natural ability to draw what I see. I've always wished for that magical talent, but I don't think it'll ever simply appear.

When I was a child, I did all the traditional fingerpaint, watercolor, etc. stuff that the other kids did, and my skills were fairly mediocre. It wasn't until sixth grade that I began to branch out, beginning with an exploration of color and geometric patterns with Crayola markers. Later on in junior high, I won a billboard design contest (in retrospect, my design was pretty bad) for an assignment in my Drawing & Painting class, but I still wasn't overly impressed with anything I did. The paintings I did in that class were my first "real" attempt at the medium (kiddy watercolors don't count), and the results were disappointed. I convinced myself that I was utterly incapable of painting anything that was worth looking at, and I mentally limited myself to pencils and markers.

I only took one art class in high school, but so many things changed after that. It was an intro class to fulfill the arts requirement, and the teacher was a slightly eccentric nun ("Sex is nasty; it's kind of like using someone else's toothbrush."), but she taught me the basics that I failed to learn before. At the time, drawing lines and shading little boxes over and over seemed tedious and meaningless, but it helped me more than I could have imagined. My artwork still wasn't much to look at, but I discovered two items that I could draw fairly competently: flowers and bows. A few years, I managed to draw my first semi-realistic-looking human face (minus the hair), which was a huge accomplishment in my mind because people have always been the hardest thing for me to draw (and still remain so). I continued my love affair with markers, creating name designs on printer paper for my friends as well as index cards with witty sayings on them to wear around campus (if you don't know, don't ask).

After high school, my artistic endeavors didn't completely cease, but I also didn't make much progress for a few years. I continued to draw flowers, bows, and female faces (without hair), but I didn't significantly improve. During the summer of my sophomore year, I participated in a study abroad program, where I took two classes: Shakespeare and British Design. I was somewhat hesitant to sign up for the design course, but I ended up doing so because none of the other options interested me. I got a good overview on the different periods of art in Britain and the opportunity to sketch things other than bows, flowers, and women, and I became interested in art again. I tried twice to get into the Beginnning Drawing class at my university, but I either was waitlisted or given a 7:30am time slot, so I never took it, and when I was scheduling for second semester junior year classes, I decided to take a risk and sign up for a painting class. (I now realize that I didn't meet the prerequisites and feel a little bad about it, but I didn't know then.)

And that was this semester. It's been a challenging time for me, and I'm very glad I stuck with it, in spite of my original preconceptions that I could never succeed in painting. The semester began with my professor announcing a $200 supply list (it still hurts!) and the first assignment: a "simple, straightforward" painting of an object on cloth. I nearly dropped the class because of that. Cloth has never been simple or straightforward to me, and I haven't even drawn a satisfactory picture of it. After that, we went to the woodshop and put together panels and canvas stretchers. I'm useless in the woodshop, and that made me want to drop the class again. Finally, we began our first painting, and he pressured me to use the large canvas first; it was somewhere along the lines of 3'x4'. The urge to drop the class became stronger; the biggest thing I've ever worked on was probably 12"x18". Looking around the classroom, I saw a lot of talent from the other students, and I eventually discovered that they were all either art majors or art minors, which intimidated me a lot. Even halfway through the class, I still wasn't sure what I was doing. Yet at the end of the semester, I have almost completed paintings that I'm very proud of.

Along the way, I was introduced to the digital painting medium: creating images that look like traditional paintings with either a mouse or stylus and some form of software. (For more information, see the links section.) Since then, I've acquired a Wacom Intuos2, and I've been working to improve my skills in this area, too. It combines two very important parts of my life (art and computers), and I don't have to mix paints!