Pigs and Cats

Today I tried drawing. I can't really draw, my most impressive creation being a house I designed when I was a fourth-grader. There's a silly story behind it too. The teacher was so impressed with my ruler-based creation that told me I should lead a class drawing project. It was about making a poster-sized version of a picture in one of our school books. I tried to tell her but she wouldn't listen. I'm not sure whether the problem was my own lack of self-confidence or that I really couldn't do it, but I failed. I gave up the project completely to someone else and I must say I remember it being pretty embarrassing. It's ironic, too, since my mother likes painting and drawing a lot, while I turned out shying away from it.

So, I googled "drawing lesson" and first found drawingcoach.com. I immediately went for the easiest tutorials and ended up starting to draw a pig. It was rather frustrating and I felt like something was amiss. When I came across a spelling mistake (which, in retrospect, seems like a silly reason to lose faith in a drawing-tutorials-site), I decided to look for something else. I came across drawspace.com. Then, I realised: there's no degree of proficiency one can get with one hour's worth of drawing. Besides, it requires proper tools and some studying before beginning. Which means I should plan ahead for future activities: I need to find things which spending one hour for isn't completely pointless.

I went back to the pig. I filled a page with the annoying little creature. When I was content with myself (read: "when the page was full") I went for the next one: the cat. That was really difficult. It took me half an hour to do the first one and by then it was already 5. Especially the nose; I ended up searching for videos of drawing cats in my strugle to interpet what a specific instruction in the tutorial meant:

Draw two diagonal lines sloping towards the middle of the head. These lines should almost touch at the middle. Add a curve to the bottom of each of the diagonal lines to form the nostrils.

Still, there was a certain point, while drawing the cat, that the frustration I had for my lack of skills turned into something else, something wonderful. I felt compelled to try to improve my drawing, to do everything again, to do it correctly. I'm not sure if I was right in enforcing my own rules and stopping when the time was up, instead of going on. That's something I'll have to consider carefully.

I hope I'll find something good to do tomorrow. Maybe I will finally convince my brother to give me that guitar lesson, who knows!