A Brief History

A Brief History

By Stephen Donnelly

Recently I have taken up a hobby of three dimensional drawing and art. I was never good at drawing on a second dimensional plane no matter how hard I tried. And the way my grandmother tried to ‘teach’ me makes it hard to want to pursue it. A lot of memories of her scratching out what I had done. Drawing over what I had drawn to make it look like she wanted it to.

I had only one drawing in my youth I was proud of and that was a transposition that was otherwise free handed but still copied and enlarged of a character from an animation I liked. I copied it from a trading card and scaled it onto a full sized sheet of notebook paper. My more direct family was relatively impressed. Even convinced me to show my grandmother who was showing some interest in me liking Japan and their shows and culture.

She didn’t like the drawing and started to ‘fix’ it in her own image of what the character should look like. It was the last time I even put effort into the arts or drawing more specifically for a very long time. I picked up music and learned several instruments but it didn’t fill the creative void that I had to create. Though I was talented and my father to this day still tells me how proud he was of me that I could make a cafeteria of parents cry from a solo of Silent Night, though I never liked that kind of attention on me.

I picked up writing to try and help with my depression and for the longest time it didn’t. I never knew how to make the day-to-day of working a soulless job, dealing with student debt, and the various ins and outs of dealing with good or bad relationships. Even though I was writing for me I never liked writing something I already have written before. Or repeat certain things over and over again. The melding of my days and the humdrum no matter the job I took was slowly eating me and no amount of journaling was making it seem just okay.

I started writing fiction. I told myself I would make it a novel one day. This gave me a little light. Though not having a way to turn these little dreams into something, hundreds of writing projects remain unfinished. Due to demotivation of self, too much pressure from too much work, or even just not having the time to justify it since none of my art has made me enough to live off of yet.

Knowing it is a hard world to break into and make a living doesn’t help with the motivation to continue any of the projects. And lack of funding to work on any of the projects to completion to have them make revenue for me slows me down. Not to mention the old artist adage of ‘just put it out there for free and hope people like it and it should be its own reward’. Though writing is my reward. And I can’t write if I don’t have the time or motivation after a long day of work.

To hopefully fix all of these issues I have run into over the years I have found Blender. It is a program I got on my computer where I could draw and model things in the third dimension. Another way to draw without having horrible memories exposing themselves and turning me away from doing something that would bring me joy.

I can create whole worlds from my imagination and put them from the page and words then put them into images. I could make those images move and dance. Creating something more alive than art on dead trees bound together to tell a story that isn't theirs, for those that aren’t imaginative enough to use words to create their own image. It is rather empowering to be able to tell a story in so many different ways that I could reach so many more people.

Though it isn’t a skill that is mastered yet it is calming. It is an art for me that has so much potential with a great community behind it and a lot of support. It is hard work trying to overcome over twenty years of refusing to do most art forms and finding out that it is something that I would much rather do than drive trucks, dispense pills, or deliver pizzas.

Reaching out through my current art form I have met so many other creators. Gained help from so many incredible tutors. And have been a part of so many different unpaid passion projects that I know for sure this is something I would love to pursue even further.

Being that this style of art relieves stress for me and is more fun to figure out how to make everything work instead of frustrating like most other projects because it just isn’t working. Whether it is googling or looking up Youtube videos to see who else has had the issues that I was having. Or just playing around with settings and trying to see what comes of it. I have spent so much time learning and growing as a person through this art form alone.