Who Knew I Could Do That?

I've always been able to draw. Rendering a likeness of something comes relatively easily to me. Back in college, I took a lot of art classes and loved them. I favored landscapes - often in charcoal or acrylic paint - and I would spend hours working on my projects. But then real life intruded and I got busy and I forgot how much I enjoyed art.

Until recently. I'm not even sure why, but I decided to take a 6-week drawing class. When you run your own business, you can find yourself still at your computer at 10 PM and I figured this would keep me away from that at least one night a week.

The class was fun, and I found I could still draw well - all my projects looked the way they were supposed to. No stress. No challenge. Until I found out that there was another 6-week class starting right afterwards. The second class was going to be very different. It was to be called 'Drawing from the Mind's Eye' and it would focus entirely on imaginative drawing. It wouldn't matter that I could draw a self-portrait well - this class would require creativity and imagination. I said I wouldn't be attending. "Creativity's just not my thing," I told the teacher. "And anyway, I'm much more interested in what's real rather than what's imaginary."

But then when class-night rolled around and there was no class, I really missed it. And so I started to alk myself into attending. 'What's the worst that could happen?' I asked myself. 'People might laugh at my drawings? They'd never do that! (Well, not out loud anyway.)' So two days before the start of the new session, I signed up.

Let me tell you - it's SO much fun! It turns out I do have an imagination. I had ideas as soon as the teacher started to explain the first assignment, and I had a lot of fun working them out on the paper. I may not be Van Gogh (most definitely am not!) but who cares? This is for me.

I've promised myself that I'll remember this the next time I'm tempted to let fear get in the way of stretching myself. I decided to share it with you in case you sometimes have the same problem.