3am Thoughts

 

I remembered when I was a kid, I started copying characters from the cartoon shows I saw on TVs like spongebob, pokemon, and etc. pretty well. And we all know that people tend to praise children when they do things that the other children of the same age can't do. Honestly, I got discouraged when I learned that there are more children that is much better than me at drawing or copying images. I'm not special. I still pickup pencil from time to time but it was not enough to love what I do. And when we grow up, we just grew out with that mindset and just start accepting that I'm not special at all. I'm not as talented as I think I was and It was fine.

Honestly, when I was 14 or 15 and I started spending my time alone is when I appreciate art itself. Around that time in junior high school, I spent my time at school drawing in the corner next to the window. Maybe it became a way to cope with the emotions I felt whenever I went to school. A way to make time felt even a little shorter, to make hours feels like minutes inside the room that felt suffocating. It's not that I hate the surroundings, In fact, I like observing things, people that passed by, the kids from other building hanging out in the hallway, and the huge tree that casts shadows at the center of the school. That's how I remember it from my seat, at least. 

And when you spent your time alone and observing things, the capacity to imagine widens or your "scope of imagination expands", that's how I think Anne of Green Gables would say it. 

That's how I also started learning to draw from the images my brain generates. I find it hilarious whenever people asked me whenever I drew a person, "Who's that?", expecting it to be a celebrity or someone they know. It was funny to me because it was hard for me to understand that people with little knowledge about arts or drawing thought that kids can only draw exactly from what they saw. Though, It was right at some point but isn't correct all the time. People are like sponges, when they were exposed in drawing things they always saw, they absorbed the knowledge and it became stuck with them and kids are sponges with even bigger pores. We learn from what we saw and it will stuck with us, enough to draw from imagination. Amazing, right?

I often heard people from art communities debating about talent vs hardwork and in my opinion, arguing about this topic is even nonsensical. I'm a person that believes in talent and won't dismiss hardwork because I believe that those two comes hand in hand. All of the artists you admire, the cartoonists and animators that made your favorite cartoon shows when you were a child is a proof. A proof that talent is nothing with hardwork. 

Talent is when you got an advantage than the others. It is when you can learn principles of arts easily, or when you understand the basic logic of perspectives better than others, or when you can draw much better shapes than your peers. That's talent. But talent itself isn't enough to be good. Talent is just an opening, it means that you might have a knack to do this or that. Talent can be used to nurture skills like drawing and drawing is a skill and so it can be earned. In order to make use of that talent, you need hardwork to make things happen, to improve, to be better. In simple words, even if you know the blueprint in your mind, it's useless if you don't pick up a pen and put it into a paper. Talent makes you able to do things and hardwork makes you do better things.

Growing up, you'll realized that the talent you have as a child is just a common sense in the world of adults and it was a common knowledge that anyone would know. It's like learning to read earlier than your peers and realizing it was just a skill one supposed to have. And to be better, you have to work hard at your pronunciation and diction. That's how it's like.

 To be honest, I won't be here if I didn't even try and start to draw or if I just decided to give up, or if I just didn't work hard. I tried to practice drawing things from my surroundings and putting ideas into the paper. I know that there are people that work harder than me and they deserve to improve and be better. All the things I know right now is earned by the experience and I know that I still have much more to know and to experience. I wonder what will the year of 2025 has to offer or if I have something to offer for next year. As always, I wonder what's ahead of me.

-SomNam, 2024/12/28