Once There Was a Girl
My first attempt with markers
Once upon a time there was a girl. She wasn’t a particularly happy child, but she loved to be creative and spent every spare moment adding to the towering stacks of drawing books and canvases and endlessly scribbled her poems and short stories in her school notebooks. Her dad had been an artist, and it made her feel like she was closer to him, that she was like him, when she drew her little pictures. She dreamed of going to art school, and unsuccessfully tried to talk people into paying for painting classes. She dreamed of writing books. She just wanted to CREATE…
And then she did. But not the way she thought she would.
The girl got pregnant. It was a struggle to finish high school while caring for a little baby all by herself, but she did it. She signed up for community college and watched all her friends head off to bright futures without her. She felt so sad, alone, and unfulfilled. She dropped out of classes the first week. She stopped drawing. She stopped writing. She started hiding. She floundered and flopped through the end of her teen years and the start of her twenties.
When she was twenty-one she forced herself out of her hidey-hole. She started school again and signed up for an art class. She hadn’t so much as scribbled in years and the first day she felt so outclassed and intimidated that she dropped out and signed up for accounting instead.
And then she met the man who would be her husband. She fell in love, got married, started a blog and started having babies. That little blog gave her a creative outlet and for a long time she was content enough to share her thoughts with a small following. Her husband would occasionally gift her with art supplies but she was too scared to try again, afraid she would make a fool out herself. And maybe still grieving for the part of her that thought she had been headed in a different direction.
Then she made a friend who taught her how to do henna and gave her a job. It was frustrating and hard at first, but she was motivated by the idea that she could help support her family. And she did henna like a boss. It was satisfying to drape and lay out lines and dots until they grew into intricate, lacy patterns. Only after she had been doing it for several years did it occur to her that this was indeed ART.
She grew a little more confident. She started another blog and befriended a website designer who talked her into sketching for her layout. People liked it, and one kind soul compared her sketches to Alphonse Mucha and she cried. And then she stuck her toes into the arty world and tentatively started doodling cartoons for her blog. People liked them and asked for more. She cried some more. Her husband outfitted her with everything she could possibly need to draw and paint and she sat and stared at the blank paper, overwhelmed by the possibilities and the very real fear that she would never be good enough to make all this worthwhile.
She completed her very first painting. It wasn’t great but she was so proud to actually finish something for the first time in over a decade. And then she saw the work of some of her childhood friends and realized it amateurish and crap and put it all away again. A few months later she scooped up enough courage to try again and when she finished her drawing she put it on her facebook page. She got such awesome, supportive comments and emails- but all she could see were the mistakes. The eyes were askew, the shading was wrong, it wasn’t good enough. People liked it anyway. They wanted prints, and several people wanted to commission her to paint something for them. She was embarrassed. It was hard for her to look at anything she had drawn or painted and think it was worthy enough to sell; she was just learning to be brave about showing her “art” to people.
And now we move forward to today…. And the girl stares at her blank page and is struggling with the urge to put it all away again because the idea of people who actually want to put something she has done ON THEIR WALLS is freaking her out. She’s afraid that she will disappoint someone, or herself.
I am very excited to be working with you, and both our artistic necks will be out there… but ya know what… it’s going to be fun and if no one else likes it… well… screw them. And I can’t be disappointed because I’m thee most laid back chill person in the world.
You are Aweome!!!
April Reply:
May 2nd, 2012 at 8:50 PM
You have not disappointed me. I can’t wait to get mine on the wall. I felt so moved by your picture for me. It is exactly what I had in my mind that I wanted but not enough skill of my own to do. I had goosebumps when I saw it.
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