I’ve drawn since childhood. I remember spending hours hunched over paper attempting to create. Sure, most of my creations were derivative and their quality questionable, but that wasn’t why I drew. I was attracted to drawing for the same reason I’m attracted to writing: I wanted to create. I didn’t understand this desire for many years. It wasn’t until law school that I was able to put it into words. Law school scared me because I feared my job after graduating would involve no creativity. This thought depressed me terribly, which was strange because I never consciously though about creating. I imagined myself pushing paper, and dotting the eyes and crossing the tees of the others creations. (Tangential remark: I found a spelling of the American alphabet—not sure about its accuracy—and thought I’d share it with you: “ay, bee, cee, dee, ee, eff, gee, aitch, eye, jay, kay, ell, em, en, oh, pea, queue, are, ess, tee, you, vee, double-you, ex, why, zee.”) Thankfully, there’s more to my job than that, but the opportunities for creativity is limited. That is why I spend much of my time away from work writing and trying to create something. (Here is where you’d usually see my self-deprecating comment about my failures as a writer. I’ll spare you it this time, but I wanted you to know that I was thinking about it.)

As a child, I didn’t consider myself serious about drawing. I guess that means I never expected to turn it into a career. For a few years, I thought about architecture, but that was more of an answer to a question that never occurred to me. What did I want to be? Except for fleeting thoughts about game programming, I never wanted to do anything. I didn’t understand the need for a career, and the question never occurred to me. It wasn’t until the end of college that I thought about it. I don’t think my thoughts were coherent, but I remember raising the question abstractly. I remember one incident in particular. I was a senior, eating lunch in the dining hall, and discussing my future with a philosophy graduate student. I was telling him about my issues (viz., complaining): I was graduating from college, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Should I go to law school, graduate school, work? Where should I live? Should I move home? Work was as an afterthought because I thought it was obvious I would continue with school. School was all I knew and anything else would require thought (this was before OT became an important part of my vocabulary). I remember the graduate student’s answer. He was short with long blonde hair. Philosophy students fall into two categories: very cool and very geeky. I leaned toward the geeky category, but he landed firmly in the cool category. He was the type that wore black and had answers to questions you didn’t even ask but would if you thought. He told me, “Man, you’re in a terribly exciting part of your life. You have all these choices in front of you. You shouldn’t be scared, you should embrace the opportunity. There are few times in life when there is so much available to you.” Not much help, I thought, but I’ve passed on his advice to many college students who were at the same point. They probably don’t understand it, as I didn’t understand it at the time, but he was right. I should have been thinking about the possibilities and my choices, instead of dreading thinking. I let life carry me instead of carrying life. I’m happy with where it brought me, but looking back, I would have preferred to be steering instead of just going for the ride. For example, I based my decision to go to law school on my famous (to my mind) line: “when in doubt go to law school.” But that’s another story.

Getting back to drawing, there were times during my childhood that I drew often. I bought art books, colored pencils, and copied pictures from magazines, comic books, and photographs. I filled sketchbooks with these doodles and pictures. I had a moderate talent for copying, a talent that I found terribly limiting. When I tried to venture into areas that were not copies, I drew poorly. What I thought at the time was that I couldn’t draw without copying. What I didn’t realize was that all drawing was copying. Good artists draw the same thing enough times until they don’t need the subject in front of them to copy it. They make changes to the copies, but most of the changes are derivative. The art and creativity comes from the combination of different copies and the changes made to the drawing, whether the changes relate to the medium (e.g., modern art) or subject. It took me a long time to understand modern art because I didn’t understand this concept. When I think about it, I realize how slow I have been about many topics that I thought I understood.

I peaked as a child artist while painting a mural with Shannon outside our freshman dorm. It was an Elmore painting based on Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s fantasy novels. The mural was huge. While I was quite good at the sketching part (we created a grid on the photocopy of the painting and sketched the painting based on the grid), it turned out my hand was not steady enough to paint. I could pick out the colors and give instructions on blending, but for detailed work, I was terrible. Luckily, Shannon’s hand was steady—he should be a famous surgeon by now, but that’s a different story—and he managed beautifully the detailed painting. I did apply the Bob Ross method to create the happy trees and happy hills because it didn’t require a steady hand. It took us a year to complete, and we stayed in our freshman dorm an extra year to gaze at its glory. I wish I had a good picture to show you, but the best I have is a blown up photograph Shannon took and donated to my art collection. I’ll scan it in one day. Supposedly, the mural is still on the wall, nicely framed and surrounded by linen wall coverings.

What does this have to do with anything? Like most of what I write, these are mostly thoughts I come up with during the day to fill space when I’m procrastinating story writing. There is a purpose to this discussion, however. I downloaded the Adobe’s (evil, evil company) Illustrator, and I’ve been playing with drawings the last couple of days. I really like the program. It’s a bit complicated, but the complications provide power. And the best part about it (at least for me) is that steady hands are not required. There are a few “freehand” drawing tools, but most of the power comes from the vector aspects, meaning anyone with a good eye for pictures can draw. You don’t need manual talents—you just need to be able to figure out what would look good, and then combine the tools until you get there. I haven’t produced any great pictures yet, but I did a few drawings, and today I’ve worked through the online tutorials. I’m hoping to experiment more over the next few days.

I’m hoping that I can use some of the drawings for the redesign of my website. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been struggling, and at Chuck’s prompting (after he tore apart my two initial designs), I’ve decided to invest effort in original drawings. I have no idea what those original drawings will look like, and how they will work with the design of the website, but those are unimportant details. I’ll post some of my artwork when I produce something worth posting—oh, wait, that’s not how I do things here. Here’s the first picture I drew with Illustrator. It doesn’t use any of the power of the program (besides the obvious gradient), but I created it, and therefore I must post it.

Now, so you don’t think I’m a complete slacker on my story, I did write one line:

“Lucille, don’t abandon me now.”

Fancy, huh.