You're an artist. Why is your blog called I'm not that good at drawing?
I've been to art clubs an classes since age 4 approximately, and drawing was always one of my favourite things to do as child. Especially if I could draw either with my mum or late grandma.
I think my strength is in colour, not so much in form and most definitely not in precision. I've never liked drawing from life because there was always a huge disconnect between my hand and eye. There still is, and I despise sketching from reference for practice.
I went to an Upper Secondary School (or high school if you're American, Gymnasium if you're Swedish) that specialised in visual arts, which is where I started fully identifying as someone who can't draw. In my group of friends everyone seemed to have their own distinct art style, and not only could they doodle from imagination, they also captured likeness seemingly effortlessly. So I started to feel inferior and only took the bare minimum of drawing classes. I got into photography and started playing with Photoshop. To be honest, I aced all of my photo classes and got top marks. My teacher wrote my university application reference.
I went on to do a Bachelor's Degree in Photographic Art, which helped me realise that I didn't actually like photography all that much. I gravitated towards video, and dance. Dance is something I'd also done from young age until I moved on to figure skating. But now, as a 20-something I again felt inadequate if I took dance classes, so instead of doing that I would dance wherever I could as long as I didn't have to share space with limber 16-year-olds.
Fast forward another couple of years and I was now starting a Master's Programme in Fine Art. Seeing a dozen extremely talented artists working across disciplines helped me let go of some of my own preconceptions about my practice. I danced and I filmed it, but I also started sculpting from clay and sketching with pencil. Why should I pick one skill and only hone that when I can practice many and combine them into something that's uniquely me?
As it turns out, in practice, being specialised would make a career in the arts more feasible. Having one thing, your thing, makes you identifiable and memorable. Even better if your thing is something that people can buy and put on their walls. Still better if you're so good at your thing that you can teach it to others. It's a fine sentiment, that you should so whatever you, as the artist, feel like you're driven to do but in reality we also have bills to pay.
So, after having taught myself coding and web design, and grown bored of it, started a few blogs, and ditched them, painted a bunch oil paintinds, dabbled in graphic design, founded an online collective and 3D modeled an interactive online gallery as well as taught myself some basic 2D and 3D animation, live motion capture, rigging, game mechanics and cloud hosting, and burnt myself out - breathe - I've now picked up drawing again.
The point is, that I really am not that good at drawing. I'm not that good at anything in particular, but I'm pretty good at learning new things and making them my own. And I'm trying to carve out a me-shaped space in the world, which demands so much and so fast. I'm not that good at drawing is about finding my own strengths. It's about the experience of never quite fitting a mould, and hopefully about overcoming obstacles. I don't know, I'm not there yet.
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