Over the last few years, I’ve had a series of unfortunate events that created some big changes in my life. My wife came out, we divorced, and I was laid off — those are just the highlights.
Understandably, I was in an existential slump.
An old friend of mine suggested I get back into drawing. For as long as I can remember I have doodled all over anything I could. Before getting into poetry, I wanted to be an animator or a cartoonist.
The “funnies” were my favorite section of the newspaper. I read them daily, especially on Sunday. I often doodled characters and comics when I should have been paying attention in class.
In high school, I began to write poetry. My poems were often accompanied by doodles. My interest and skill in art led me to a career in graphic design and marketing. As the years went by, drawing for fun faded away.
Now that I was in a moment of crisis, my friend’s words called me back to the pencil and paper I had left behind.
Years before the divorce, I had signed up for an art school online, the Schoolof Visual Storytelling. I had started classes but life caught up to me. I decided to go back to it to help jump-start my journey back to myself.
Going back to the basics helped get my brain reconnected to my hand, a connection I was not aware was severed. It felt good drawing shapes over and over. A task I hated in college. Shapes turned to objects, and objects became characters. One day I realized I was drawing the same two characters. One was a scruffy-looking muppet character, the other was a blocky Cyclops.
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