Are We Having Fun Yet?

You got to love it. You finally realized that you downright suck at drawing, and you swallow what little scrap of pride you have left and decide to indulge in a couple or a triple barrage of tutorials and drawing books, and of course, we all know most likely what the very first or the very last comment to emerge from the ever so wise master's iron grip of artistic supremacy is gonna' be:

"Have fun!!"

Let's face it, we artists like to lie. We like to lie a lot.You don't get a job fabricating reality from imagination without learning a trick or two about practical application in real life. We like to say that we love our work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and even want to do it in our sleep if we possibly can. Hell, we'd love to do it when we are old and gray and need to take insulin, caffeine and excessive amounts of viagra in one dose every ten minutes to stay awake. For mighty drawing warriors like us, we just can't wait to wake up each day to prance around our little drawing desks and get back to work like a winter fairy in the spring time. That's the kind of stuff that would look really good on a résumé, after all. Then we realize on a nice chilly winter day, that the hand that we just drew looks like a decapitated rooster head, the neck looks like a stick of butter and the head looks like it belonged to ET. Then there is the background, which in all its glory, has all of the indications that you just subscribe to "Drunk o' Vision" last Tuesday night while driving blind folded and listening to nonstop polka on a Wheaties binge. It's about this point in time that you wonder if you should spring for a nylon rope or just use your shoe lace. What for? Why, to hang yourself of course, because using it to tie anything else together would just make too much sense for a deviant little artist like you!

Since you decided to use the shoe lace, ya' screwed up, so there is only one thing to do - spring for the nylon rope. So looking desperately for something to pawn off to save some serious bling whales, you come across one of your overly priced books on drawing, and what's the first thing it says in it? Why, it says "Have fun!" Like hell you will!

There are a lot of things that are fun in this world. Playing video games, sky diving, stuffing your face full of food and ruining your best friend's social life are some of them. However, drawing and fun mix about as well as your hand and a blender. First of all, the drawing part is never fun, it's the damn results that are the only thing worth enjoying, and anyone who says that the whole process is joyful bliss is either a liar or a masochist. If the whole process was all fun and joy, then that dude in the myths who keeps on rolling that huge boulder up the mountain as his life's work, only to have it roll back down, must be having a fricken' blast.

Yeah, yeah, they tell ya' that it's the journey that is more important than the destination, you know what that really translates into, right? - Ya' screwed up. It's just like those people who say, "It's the thought that counts", well, if you think stupid, it ain 't gonna' count for very much.Yeah, it's all great when you say, "I screwed up like you wouldn't believe, but it was a great learning experience!". That'd sit real well if you were a surgeon and sew a patients arm to their leg. So why would it be any different if you are an artist? That's why drawing is reality's way of telling you that self expression is all about pain, suffering, and agony in your mortal life. If you suck at the process, then you are gonna' blow at the results, and that's all great in the learning experience if you happen to want to waste twenty years of your life.

So what part of this grandiose art form is actually worth doing? Oh, of course, expressing yourself! How could I forget? There are only more than six billion people on the planet that would love to express themselves, and you are only one of them, so nobody really cares! And guess what? Half of them draw better than you!

Oh, but of course, it's great to learn how to draw in your own unique style - except for the fact that it looks the exact same as everybody else's, you know why? It's because you were so utterly talentless to begin with that you couldn't draw worth squat if you didn't follow the tutorials, so now you're just a happy go lucky derivative, but that's okay, because if the person who you ripped off got hit by a run away train on the freeway along with every one else he ripped of off, you have an additional one in a billion chance of getting their job, which is still a much better chance than you learning how to draw on your own.

Of course, it's inarguable that the most fun part of drawing is finishing off the product and seeing how all your hard work paid off, and for about three minutes it might actually look good, until an esteemed colleague walks by and delivers a spoon full of truthful commentary straight smack dab to your easily inflatable and completely machine washable ego, and what do they say? "Dude! That guy looks like girl!" well, it is a chick, but hey, now you know for sure that you are a talentless hack that can't tell one gender apart from the other, even though there are really only two of them, and between the 98% chance of getting either one, you were so horrible that you managed to put it in the 2% category where nobody can tell what the heck it is. That's just great, cause now you realize that you're not only a dumbass draftsman, but you don't even know what your sexual orientation is either.

Hey kiddies, here's a little trick to make yourself feel better than you really are! Surround yourself with idiots and people who suck even more than you do, cause in the kingdom of the blind, the man with a semi automatic shotgun has a better change of hitting something than the dude with the board and a nail through it. Go to a crappy art community, where someone draws a Pikachu that looks something you vomited out this morning when you were testing to see if that five month old omelet was still okay to eat.

Face it, even the most incredibly talented of visual artists on our planet have never remotely achieved the admiration and fame of their musical counterparts, isn't that a good sign that you're in the wrong field of work, in additional to completely sucking at it? A talentless hack and their five minutes of fame belting out "Living In America" with any given accent on American Idol will be more famous than you'll ever be, and it took only a billionth of the time. And of course, remember this well, even if you were the best of your little bitty anti-social art universe, someone would find a reason to hate you and drag you down to Hell with them, because everybody loves a winner - except for the losers.

You want to take this whole artist thing seriously? You want to get a serious job and make money doing the thing that you love? Well, you'd better plan to be a virgin for a real long time, cause your social life is about to go straight down, along with your ex-friend on another guy. Oh, but that's okay, you can DRAW your own girlfriend, that's just peachy. Why settle for the real thing in real life when you can have your very own personal sexual caricature rendered in dead fossilized animals on dead trees? This all sounds strawberry in concept, but you forgot a little something, do you know what it is? That's right, you couldn't draw your own crap if you stuck your head straight up your ass!!

So have FUN!