I was interested in art when I was much younger, but I sort of lost interest at a pretty young age. Sometimes, throughout middle school and high school, I would doodle on the sides of my papers, but I was never that good. During my senior year in high school, I decided to draw something. Not just a doodle; I spent about two hours on this pencil drawing. And I was very happy with it. I started drawing more pictures over the next couple of weeks, but eventually my interest sort of died down again. I had run out of ideas for things to draw, I had run out of media to use (I only had pencils and colored pencils) and I didn't really know how to draw things without looking up drawings of those things to use as guides. So, as much as I realized I liked drawing, it stopped being fun for me.
My real passion is film. Don't get me wrong; I love drawing. But when I chose my major, I picked the closest thing to what I had been doing all of high school in the Media Arts Program. So I am majoring in Digital Media Art (DMA). Much to my excitement, a prerequisite I had to take for this major was Beginning Drawing. Maybe it's my skilled, encouraging and super-awesome professor, or maybe I'm good at picking up skills (OK no, it's my professor), but I have learned a ton of skills in this class. My biggest milestone is learning to draw people. But I can name 10 other drawing skills in this class that I've learned, just off the top of my head. But what I've really taken away from this class is that drawing has always been a passion of mine -- I just needed to learn how to do it. And now, I absolutely love it. A few days ago, I spent three hours on a self-portrait, and I'm still very excited that it actually looks like me.
Another requirement for my major is 2D Design and Color Concepts. In this class, I've learned how to create more technical art; more abstract. I've learned a variety of skills and used a variety of different media for this class as well. So not only have I learned how much I love to draw, but art in general has become very fun for me.
Of course, these classes are fairly unrelated to my major. When I pictured my major, I thought of film and photography, not drawing. So it was sort of a coincidence that I happened to love the skills I'm learning. If I hadn't been required to take these classes, I would have most likely given up on drawing, or art in general. It's easy to do that when we lose interest in something out of frustration, but I've learned that improving skills and staying with it is extremely important when you find something you love to do. You'll be very happy you did.
