The Summer of 70-page Notebooks

I was very creative and destructive as a six-year-old. Coloring books drove me nuts because I didn't want to stay inside the lines, but always felt compelled to. It was shit like that that made me want to break stuff. So I took apart toys, with no intention of putting them back together. My dad was very proud--he thought I was curious about how things work, and he envisioned me to be an enginneer just like himself.

Nah, I just wanted to break things apart. New toys became annoying to me after a couple weeks, and I felt the best way for me to have satisfaction was to destroy them. My parents started to cut down on buying me toys, so my destructive focus moved to my books. I busted out my crayons and had laser beams shooting out of Uncle Scrooge's eyes. Huey, Dewey, and Lewey had fangs. I thought it was pretty cool, and my Aunt Lan must have saw the artistic soul in me, so soon after, she had me drawing things outside with her in sketch books.

The first thing we drew was a sculpture of a bunch of sea horses in my front lawn. Aunt Lan was a very gifted artist--the sea horses she sketched looked incredible to me. I was in total awe. However she looked over at my paper and told me that my sea horses were out of proportion. My blood was boiling when she said that; I wanted to toss my pencil out of sight, crumble up my sheet of paper, and beat the unliving shit out of those stupid sea horses. But I didn't want her to call me a crybaby, so I just kept at it.

I hated every minute of it and was humiliated. I hated how I was supposed to make my sea horses look like the sea horses in front of me. I hated how complicated their shapes were, and above all I hated how my aunt drew them effortlessly. I barely finished the drawing. It was crap, but form that point on I was obsessed. I wanted to draw better than my aunt, and then after that I wanted to be the most skilled artist in the world. Competition was my muse.

I found unused 70-page notebooks in the basement and every day I drew on them. I created picture stories of monsters taking over the world, and things like that. It was so much fun, and extremely cathartic. I was now creating things instead of destroying. That summer, I had drawn on every page of a 70-page notebook on a daily basis. After going through at least twenty of these notebooks, my artistic skill had exploded by the end of that summer. I didn't think I was better than my aunt yet, but I was pleased that I finally understood concepts such as perspective, shadowing, and proportion.