Mom Raised an Artist
A lesson in art and life.
Mom taught me a lot of important lessons. Many lessons were a one and done deal, like don’t pull the dog’s tail or he’ll bite you. He did, and I haven’t pulled a dog’s tail since. Mom warned me. It was a good lesson. I just didn’t listen which has been a recurring theme throughout my life. I’m a little stubborn.
Other lessons helped define my path, and encouraged me to keep going.
I’ve drawn all my life. I think it was a gift growing up with a temperamental TV antenna that worked for a couple hours a day if the weather was perfect, and the tree canopies were willing. Otherwise, I would’ve surely wasted my early years away creating an ass print on the couch, eyes glued to the idiot box. Instead, I drew things I wanted to see. By the time the shady satellite dealer visited our little house in the holler, talked us into buying a monstrous dish that took up most of our yard, I was already hooked on drawing; the most wonderful drug of all.
I was a video game dork, though. That didn’t mean the same thing then as it does today. Eight-hour gaming sessions weren’t a thing and in fact it was very uncool to play video games. at all! This would’ve been a problem had I not been six foot tall in middle school. However, kids chose to ostracize me over pummeling (wise choice), and largely left me alone which was fine by me.
Something else that was different was the lack of internet, which meant the state of the game as you bought it was the state of the game for as long as you owned it. No patches. No game-expanding downloadable content. Disappointed by these limitations, I often drew new screens for my favorite games. In Prince of Persia, this meant new trap rooms to crush, eviscerate, and otherwise game-over my weak, sluggish prince character. There was zero thoughts or ambitions about making video games one day. I just wanted to see more, so I created what wasn’t available to me.
When the video game Mortal Kombat released, every printing press on the planet pumped out strategy guides, magazines, art books, and comics. I bought every piece of printed material that I could convince my parents to buy. I didn’t care about the strategies. I wanted that badass art. I’d lay down tracing paper, what was then called onion skin of which my parents bought me a large box from a now defunct office supply store, and trace over the art. I’d finish it off with colored pencils. The character Goro was not a great anatomy study for my developing mind—he has four toes, twelve fingers, and four arms. Although, you could say it all makes sense given the art I create today, but I digress. The takeaway is that art and creating art was more important to me over all else and thankfully both my parents supported my passion.
But it was my mom who bestowed upon me an important lesson that I use every single day I pick up a pencil.
When I was about seven years old, I drew an underwater scene. I didn’t know what underwater looked like. I knew there was dancing vegetation and colorful fish. Maybe there were some mountains and valleys. But when I finished my drawing, it didn’t look like it was a view underwater. It looked like an alien planet.
I showed mom and asked what was wrong with it. Understand that my mom wasn’t an artist, at least not the visual kind, but she’s all I had. She could’ve looked at my pitiful alien-planet-clearly-not-underwater drawing and said that it looked great, honey like some disinterested, absentee parent. Instead, she studied it for a moment and said, “I’m not sure. Let’s see if we can figure it out together.”
Only wealthy hyper-dorks had internet in those days, and I’m not sure how useful it’d been anyway. But mom had the old school internet—printed word.
She pulled out an encyclopedia or two and found some National Geographics with underwater scenes. We looked at the photos, read some descriptions, and decided that underwater is kind of blurry and warped. I did my best to turn this knowledge into art. It probably didn’t look very much like an underwater scene, but it didn’t look like an alien planet anymore, either. That was good enough for me.
Mom said that if I didn’t know, find out. It’s the best art advice I’ve ever received. When a drawing or painting is looking off, I don’t ignore it or poke at it randomly until it looks okay. I stop what I’m doing and think about what’s wrong about it. I then go into action to correct what’s wrong, whether that’s researching anatomy or even creating a 3D model to better understand. This alone has made me a better artist 1,000-fold.
It's not a bad life lesson, either. If something isn’t right, stop and observe before you try to fix it. And if you don’t know how to fix it, seek resources. Doing this has served me well.
Thanks, mom. I love you.