#reclaiming creativity

[the-lazy-pig-author]

Art

So I've told myself for years that I can't draw. When I was younger (middle and high school) I drew A LOT and wrote A LOT. Those were my creative outlets to distract myself from a terrible home life. I started out drawing anime. I didn't draw anything original. I would copy my favorite anime characters. Notice I did NOT trace. I would look at the reference picture and draw it on on another piece of paper. I never passed the work off as my own. I was very up front that this was art that I copied. I liked doing this, as I wasn't allowed to take art classes growing up. Other people and myself bought drawing books to teach me how to draw. Because and I quote from my mother herself, "Art will get you nowhere". So this method helped me learn how to create characters. Later on, I started to venture away from that and draw my own art. I just never liked it because it was never as good as the art that I copied. It just always looked weird to me. I also got bullied for it in school. Like HEAVILY bullied. I had to hide my art, and then couldn't talk to my mom about it because she was extremely bias against art skills and also .........said anime was teaching me black magic........so really didn't like her seeing me draw anime. So you could say I have some trauma around drawing lol.

Well my therapist was telling me that I should start with some doodling. Don't give myself a project just doodle every now and then and praise myself for doing it. My best friend also scolded me yesterday when she heard me say that I'm not good at art and never was and this BITCH pulled out from her cabinet samples of my old works!! Like...she freaking kept them, art I did 11? or so years ago! She said she loved the style so much that she even wants to frame them and have them tattooed on her.......that just I don't know....made me think that maybe I could draw again. I want to. It's something of mine that got left behind so many years ago that I'm sad that never got to flourish because a terrible parent made me feel bad about it and peers at my school mocked me for it.

So today.......I went to a restaurant. While at that restaurant....my phone died repeatedly lol. It's old as hell and needs to be replaced. It just kept shutting down and restarting the entire time I was out for lunch. I did bring a journal with me to write down some notes as I researched some things for my fanfiction and novels but that went out the window so.....I drew......I really didn't know what to draw and I was thinking of my throne of hell story so I kinda drew something that looked like alastor. These are not amazing please but I am proud of myself for doing it and attempting it and it's making me want to draw again. I still have my drawing tablets I bought awhile back. I never was able to color things. Color theory just goes over my head honestly but I can take it one step at a time now that I know that I really can do this.

[glamlet69]

When I was a child, around ten years old, my dad taught me how to make newsletters in Microsoft Publisher. He was making one for work and he was getting really excited about it, and I showed enough interest that he showed me how to do it.

Using those meager skills he taught me, I made a newsletter about cats called Meow Monthly, because I had just gotten a little black kitten that I was obsessed with.

My parents thought it was really great that I was doing it and helped me print out my issues and distribute them via email to people at my church. They helped me go to Petco and interview the employees about cats that needed homes so that I could put them in my newsletter.

At the end I probably garnered maybe twenty subscribers. Every issue I was implementing new techniques that I had learned, putting in clip art and photos of cats that I was highlighting. Introducing new sections to it so that it grew from one 8.5x11 sheet of paper to two or three. It was pure joy making them. And I genuinely do think people liked reading it. And you know what? I still have them. And they still kind of hold up.

It just makes me so nostalgic for the time that I was learning and creating for the pure joy of it. Not to make money off of it. I hope that one day soon I can find my way back to that unbridled joy, and reclaim the creativity that I lost to growing up.