Obviously a lot has happened in my life between the age of four and now. I didn’t immediately become an amazing artist who could draw someone’s portrait in thirty seconds. For many years I couldn’t draw from life at all. In third grade I decided I wanted to be a cartoonist, and I drew a great many cartoons from then until Junior High school. It was my seventh grade art teacher, in fact, who introduced me to a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” which I highly recommend. See, I’d been drawing using my left brain – converting everything I saw into symbols. Eyes are round, I thought, pupils are little black dots or circles with dots in them. The mouth is a crescent shape. Doing the exercises in that book, and many more in art class, taught me for the first time how to actually see what was around me and draw it out myself! More on that soon…