Like most things, my path to learning to draw was neither linear nor finite. I did not just “start” drawing; it was a slow and blurry process. To fully understand why I began to draw, I had to look first at the environment where I grew up. Both my parents studied architecture, so art and design permeated every corner of my house. When I first began to observe the world around me, I noticed drawings, oddly shaped objects, and books filled with pictures of houses. Every part of my early childhood had some art injected into it. Naturally, as soon as I gained the fine motor skills to use a pencil, I quickly began to draw. My imagination would run wild as I drew—worlds emerged out of the foreign world around me that I was still discovering. I understood so little, so I created context in my head to give the world reason.
No object intrigued me more than the plane. How could something so big and heavy not fall down? I could only wonder what strange magic occurred within the aluminum shell that enabled such a feat. To tackle this dilemma, I took to paper. I drew different planes, cutting them in half so the internals would be revealed. I used what parts jutted out of the body to guess their purpose. Could this hole be an intake for air? Could it be a vent? As I did this, my mental picture of a plane began to form. Drawing helped me work through the form in my head; it let me finally understand the world to the degree that satisfied me. As I grew older, I continued to explore the world around me through drawing. I began to look at light, the way shadows and reflections hid and revealed the spaces around me. If I saw an object or thing that interested me, I would draw it. My drawing was never fueled by a desire to “know how to draw.” I never really took classes or followed step-by-step instructions, and when I did, I would always do my own thing.
By middle school, all of the drawings that I had done as a kid had begun to show in my work. I began to draw faster and with more confidence. I don’t remember the moment, but at some point I switched to drawing entirely in pen. I hated how light pencils were and how, when they were erased, they left marks. I would rather restart than have traces of mistakes in my work. I would lean over my paper so much that my eyes would begin to ache with fatigue. I could not accept any imperfections.
When I entered high school, this perfectionism had spread to nearly every type of work I created. Whether it was a science lab or a history essay, I would spend hours writing and rewriting my work. When I wrote, I would always try to get it right the first time. Like with a pen, I would only move on once I wrote a sentence “perfectly.” I remember writing an essay on Gilgamesh in English 1B, and I spent nearly an hour writing and deleting my introduction. My drawing at this point was getting increasingly more complex. I had become obsessed with crosshatching, and I owned every size of the Sakura Micron pens. When I drew, I would use the smallest size (.005mm) so I could include every detail. I would draw every screw, every window in a skyline. I had learned to crosshatch and would try to make the hatching so small that it would appear like a solid shade of grey from far away. I would spend hours burning myself out in an attempt to achieve perfection. By the end of freshman year, I could not bring myself to draw. I spent most of the summer between freshman and sophomore year sitting around and doing nothing. I played games, visited family, went on hikes, but almost never drew. When I did, I felt stuck, I struggled to focus, and I lacked any motivation to finish a project. I missed drawing, but I could never find the same feeling that had gotten me hooked initially.
As I got back into school, I began to go to volleyball open gyms. One of the juniors on the team was also an artist, and I had begun talking to her about art. One day, after an open gym, she suggested that I try out the nude figure drawing class that she was in. As a little sophomore, the thought of going to a nude figure drawing class sounded like insanity (and it kinda was), so at first I refused to do it. But after I talked to my mom about it, and gaslighted myself into thinking it was not weird at all that I would draw naked people at 15, I decided to give it a shot. When I entered, the first exercise we did was a 1-minute drawing. For the first couple of poses, I only managed to draw a couple of lines before I ran out of time. I got caught up in making my lines perfect, so I could not even come close to finishing. Finally, I realized that I had to let go of this perfectionism. I took my pen and just drew, not caring about the final product or if what I was drawing actually had to resemble a human. Slowly, session by session, I cared less and less about the final product. The perfectionism that had kept me feeling like I was walking through mud began to ease; I could draw faster and messier. As the year progressed, this new, quick, and expressive artwork inspired me to start painting. I did not care if what I was drawing resembled anything; I just drew with my intuition. It was fun—I began to enjoy drawing again, and my new freedom enabled me to try out new techniques and styles. Finally, when I was again given a project that required technical skill and detail, I found myself not getting stuck, but being quick and messy. I could start big, with a blurry idea, and slowly sculpt and render the form until every part was detailed. My drawings began to look like one piece of work, not different drawings attempting to be one.