Sometimes, when I see an interesting piece of art in my timeline, often a piece of someone’s TG Webcomic, I’ll think to myself, “I wish I could draw.” My only tools in storytelling, for the most part, are words, but it would be fun and exciting to add a visual component to what I do. Everybody likes to look at a sexy or provocative drawing, which says so much more than words on a screen can.
“I wish I could draw,” I think. However, I never verbalize this thought because I always imagine some well-meaning person popping up to remind me that I could learn to draw — wishing won’t make it happen, but practice and study will.
This is true, but it’s not terribly helpful. There are only a finite number of hours in a day, and only a finite number of days in a year, and only a finite number of years in a life. I’ve already devoted a lot of them — the part of your life when you develop skills and interests — to writing. I love writing. I think I’m good at it (and others have agreed.) It comes fairly naturally to me.
Art does not come naturally to me. I didn’t do well in art class in school. I wasn’t interested in pursuing it as an elective or anything. I feel like I hit a ceiling with how good I was going to get at art years ago, more or less.
As it happens, that ceiling is actually reasonably high. I’m honestly pretty handy at drawing things sometimes. I drew my own webcomic in my teens, and another one in my 20’s, and while nobody would accuse me of being a virtuoso, the things looked how they were supposed to look and the story moved how it was supposed to move.
Even today, I keep a rarely-used sketchbook next to my desk just in case I feel the desire to put pencil to paper. I can usually draw something, and that something is usually some form of transformation scene. What appears to be a woman looking down at her own body in shock and horror. A person in wrong-gendered clothes. A head on an incongruous body. As you may know I have a DeviantArt account where I used to post a fairly considerable amount of my own drawings, back when I was working from home and had occasion to slack off. (It became more notably the home of photo-manipulations and captions and has hardly been used at all lately.)
I can make a pencil move, and it will look more or less like what I envision — although sometimes only after a bit of argument with it, or compromise. Are the drawings good? Limited, perhaps, but I have a style that I like and is not really a ripoff of anyone else. I could stand to learn more about anatomy, perspective, composition, but, well…
There’s drawing and then there’s being an artist, which I guess is what I’m really talking about when I muse “I wish I could draw.” After finishing one drawing, I’m usually exhausted and have no desire to follow it up. I don’t have much of a knack for the other things required to turn random art into a story — coloring, lettering, hell, even backgrounds. The standard is very high.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. My artwork — such as it is — languishes at a certain level because it’s not a skill I chose or choose to cultivate. I don’t cultivate it because it only ever reached a certain level. I don’t even own a drawing tablet — which is standard for modern artists, as far as I know — because I don’t think the investment would be worthwhile. The only drawing I do is literally pencil to paper.
I could invest time, energy and money in developing this skill, I suppose, but I feel that art would never come as naturally to me as writing. When I write — when I am at a keyboard or contemplating a story — everything clicks into place, and though it’s not without labor, it’s labor I’m predisposed to. The parts of writing that are work feel good and gratifying to me, as I imagine the labor of learning to draw and proceeding to draw are for artistic types.
As of right now, I am about 85% done what will be my next story in the Poles Reversed series. This has taken about 9 hours of work. In the same length of time I could probably produce two or three pages of a comic, albeit with a lot of frustration, and none of which would stand up to anything anyone could do on TGComics.com, for example. So yes, I envy them, because creating those wonderful pictures seems to come as naturally to them as writing stories comes to me, and the results are often a lot more celebrated.
For what it’s worth, I’m proud of what I can do. And there are times I think I could brave criticism and overcome my lack of innate talent to produce something serviceable in the world of TG webcomic fare. But the effort — the immense effort of such a thing — suggests I just stick to what comes easily to me.
I chose to focus on — or was drawn to — the skills I have developed. I’m a good writer, and I’m happy with what I’ve done in that mode. It can just be so hard to appreciate what you do have going for you, when you are so aware of what you don’t.