The Lion's Pride Lion's Pride Volume 12 (Spring 2019) | Page 47

me to draw. She would buy sketching books for me to study in, where I
would draw everything from simple pictures of characters from the
cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to detailed sketches of robots. Of
course, I wasn’t a professional artist, but I was only five at the time. But
my mother would always tell me my sketches were amazing, which
encouraged me to continue drawing and show my drawings off to my
friends and other students at my school. Being as young as I was, some
people thought they were awesome, and others thought I was a geek.
Later in my life, I was attending middle school and taking pottery
classes. The instructor of the class was Oliver, whom I’ve known a very
long time. I took his pottery classes every year trying to get better with
the trade skill of clay. I took his classes for five years trying to make
something decent. Overall, Oliver is the best in the state for pottery,
hands down, but I never could get a grasp on the skill side of pottery.
Sure, I made some cool things, but down inside of me, it was all just
garbage. In the class, you were supposed to sketch two times a week,
and, at the end of the class, he would flip through your sketchbook and
see what you have sketched for the year. I filled up an entire sketchbook
full of “memes” that I would see on the internet and cartoon characters.
At this time in my life, I was not drawing or sketching much, and I was
just doing it because it was an assignment, but doing this through the
years helped me to get comfortable with drawing and coloring.