How I Fell Out of Love With Art

In English class, we read a piece by Avery Erwin titled “How I Fell Out of Love With the Internet“, which uses a listed and second person narrative. I wanted to write my own version of this, with respect to art and creativity (as ironic as that sounds). I mimicked the original writer’s style.

1.Fall in love with art

 

Grab a handful of Crayola crayons. Flip through a stack of rough colored construction paper. Think about what you want to draw. Think of cars, people, animals, food. Pick which colors will get the job done – purple for a dog, pink for a cow, blue for your Mom and Dad. Scribble all over the page, draw large circles, happy smiley faces and a sun with sunglasses. Eagerly run up to your parents with the masterpiece out in front of you. Watch them hang the picture on the fridge with a magnet from some vacation in the Bahamas.

2. Expand your horizons

 

 

Select a few colored pencils (the more sophisticated art tool) and grab a piece of pristine white paper from the printer. Carefully sharpen the array of colors. Actively plan out what kind of scene you want to draw. The beach? The beach is a fun thing to draw – crabs, fish, umbrellas, and the sun with sunglasses. Draw your family and label each one with their names underneath, you’re a big kid now. You can spell “Cat” “Mouse” and “Happy” – big kids include writing in their drawings. It shows you’re smart.

3. Go beyond the paper

 

 

Get excited when your parents gift you a craft set for your birthday. Look through the cardboard, the string, the cloth and a bundle of popsicle sticks. Steal some cotton balls from your upstairs bathroom and tape them with all the scotch tape in your parent’s desk to make a winter wonderland. Braid friendship bracelets for your friends and family from the rainbow string. Cut out the cardboard and make little houses from it. Use the popsicles to make a picture frame and  stickers that smell like berries.

4. Do the right work

 

 

Come home from school and throw your backpack on the table. Take out your #2 pencil with the orange eraser cap on it. Quickly fill out the page of multiplication rules and push it to the side. The page only looks gray. Where did the color go? Look up drawing tutorials of how to draw animals. Be frustrated the interruption by your parents to finish homework. It’s finished, okay?

 

5. Replace your tools

 

Feel your backpack become heavier from binders and textbooks. See the colorful pages turn into walls of text. Essays are a must – good students know how to write essays. The pictures you see now are only diagrams and pie charts. Stuff words into your head. Stuff the facts. Stare at the black and white pages. The only letter that seems to matter on the paper is “A.”

6. Salvage art skills

 

Listen to your teacher assign a creative assignment. Look around your room for a box of broken colored pencils that you hadn’t bothered to sharpen. Notice half the pencils missing. Shrug and continue on. Look up examples of cool projects. A volcano? Too basic. Vigorously search further for more projects. A solar system – classic. You can’t go wrong with a solar system. Search through your dusted box of craft supplies. The only thing that comes to mind is perfectly shaped spheres and pipe cleaners, none of which you have. You haven’t had to buy those in a long time, and neither have your parents. Go to the store to buy the exact materials you need. Make all the planets with with accurate detail and mathematical equations. Make the finishing touches to the sun with no sunglasses. Points will be taken off for suns with sunglasses.

 

7. Be smart

 

Research, research, research. Pictures are only for explanation. Write a college essay about your life, but with flare. Only thoughts of “Point-Evidence-Analysis” come to mind. You think back to the events in your life that could be interesting. You look through past pictures, some framed in popsicles. Nothing seems to come to mind.