It’s so frustrating when you find yourself smack at the beginning again.

Since I was a kiddywink, it’s always been encouraged and assumed that I would grow up to be an artist. I’ve always been pretty talented at it – did well at school, then went off to uni to do an art degree. After a awful finish to my university experience (and dude, it still stings now) I barely picked up pencil and paper let alone paint and canvas/paper… until recently.

Man do I suck!

When you know that just over a year ago, you could draw any idea you had in your head (and they were all great ideas in that head) and get on paper exactly how you envisoned it, and now you can’t, it’s like having winter gloves on while playing the piano. You know if didn’t have those gloves on you would be playing beautiful sonatas right now just like before you met those damned gloves, but though you can still clumsily bang out a tune, it’s not real music.

When something you love gets so much baggage you can barely approach it let alone have fun with it, what do you do? I don’t know. It’s one of my dreams of 2011 to become an artist again, get back what I have lost – geeking out over composition sketches, having a great, purposeful, satisfying time working on a well-planned out picture, getting lost in time while happily in my sketchbook –  and find a way to love what I would like to make a living out of again.

But that will take a LOT of practice.