Back When I Was Still Using a Pencil

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

Howard Ikemoto

My favourite definition of art was one proposed by scientist and artist Desmond Morris and to paraphrase a paraphrase by Joe Fulgham from the Art episode of the Caustic Soda podcast: "Art is anything that humans do that's not done for survival, procreation and entertainment."

I personally prefer explaining myself through prose while relegating what modicum of visual artistic skills I do command to illustrating my written words (examples here, here and here) and doing pro bono design work for my college's student council (here, here, here and there). Of course, most of what I've showcased in my blog here were created after I've discovered Photoshop and taught myself how not to suck too badly on it. Before that, I made art the traditional pen-and-pencil way, and it was the only way by which I expressed myself before I discovered my love for the English language when I was sixteen years old and started indulging in expressionistic writing seriously (I had a poetry phase but I would prefer not to talk about that). While I couldn't paint, I certainly sketched prolifically in my entire childhood, through high school, and into my early university years. Unfortunately, most of what I produced was lost to the yore of yesteryears with only a handful of later pieces surviving into digitalisation.

Because the internet never forgets, I managed to resurrect a few from my now defunct deviantART account. Do click on them to embiggen,

An ogre toting a typewriter and a bank vole. No reason.

I called this one "The Shepherd Tree".

An aging pilgrim and a little girl.

A fan art of Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell entitled "From the Mirror".
I experimented with a new technique for this, smudging lines with my thumb and fingers.

A sorcerous wraith: I was mostly practicing how to draw fabric realistically here.

When I was a kid, I always thought that I would grow up to be an artist of some kind before my aspirations morphed into a more literary pursuit. That, and I went to medical school for some reason. I even had watercolour lessons for a spell which did absolutely nothing except convince me that I lack, probably on a genetic level, what it takes to paint with actual brushes - so I quit it like I quit my piano, organ, taekwondo and Chinese classes.

Anyway, what do you think of them?

Has skills useless to his day job,

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