My thoughts on drawing...

Well, I guess I'll start with a little history. I've been drawing pretty much as long as I can remember. I probably began with little doodles and sketches of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid - Dexter's Lab, Hey Arnold, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z, etc. I think it was when I got to middle school that I first took art seriously. My county's board of education held an art contest, in which the top student art from each school would end up on that year's school calendar. I drew the space shuttle Columbia (it was the year after the shuttle disaster), and it ended up on the cover of the calendar and got me really thinking about pursuing drawing more passionately. Once I got to high school I kept at it - I took an art class my sophomore, junior, and senior years, and even participated in several art shows locally and state wide (and won some nice prize money :P). I haven't really had a chance to do a lot of drawing/painting since I've been in college, so I'm definitely happy to be taking this class.

I think that for me drawing is both a cool way to pass time and a nice outlet for me to hide from the stresses and trivial annoyances of life. I really don't give a damn about my physics homework or my internship application when I'm scribbling away on some new project. As cheesy as it sounds, I kind of get lost in the work - for a few brief hours everything else just doesn't matter. It's just me, the pencil, and the paper. However, I won't say that drawing is always fun and full of warm fuzzy feelings. It definitely gets frustrating, even to the point of me giving up entirely. I've had more than a few works that I've completely abandoned simply because I didn't feel it was going well, or I was in a bad mood. But these instances never steer me away from art - in fact, I feel that all of this is part of the creative process. I dig every minute of it - the good and the bad.

Even though I plan on going into the medical field, I don't really want to rule out art as a career path just yet - Ideally, I'd like to retire relatively early from medicine and go to art school, in the hopes of becoming a concept artist for video game or film production - So I'll just have to wait and see where life takes me. But until then, I'll keep on drawing - I couldn't imagine how much more boring my life would be without it.