My entire life, I’ve considered myself to be bad at art. As I put it in my MIT application, “I frequently have difficulty drawing a straight line.” I love working with my hands so, in theory, sculpting or painting is something I would enjoy. In practice, I never know what I want to make and when I try to make something and it doesn’t turn out exactly how I imagined it, I get frustrated. Art has always been an unattainable hobby and, for the most part, I was content to leave it as something that I could appreciate but never actually do myself. I want to set the record straight right now: this is not the story of how I suddenly became an art god during the quarantine. This is instead a story about how I finally got over the fear of making something that would be “bad” and learned to enjoy the process of creating without worrying so much about the end product.
It started with the bookshelves. I was restless and quarantined, lying on my bed staring at the ceiling when I looked to my left and saw them, boring and white and ripe for the painting. I could see what I wanted them to be: cornflower blue (like Belle’s dress in Beauty and the Beast), maybe some gold accents, literary murals painted wherever there was enough room to fit one.
I could also sense that the vision in my mind was not something that was actually possible for me to accomplish but, for once, that wasn’t enough to make me not want to take on the project. Have I mentioned I was extremely bored? Before long, the bookshelves were disassembled on the floor of the garage waiting to be painted. Over the course of several weeks, I layered them with coats of blue and, eventually, painted simple murals depicting scenes from two of my favorite books (Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia).
As you can tell, the finished versions of the bookshelves are quite different from what I had imagined when I began: the murals are very simple and monochromatic and I only painted them on one part of the bookshelves, as opposed to everywhere I could find enough space. Despite all that, it felt good to work hard on and finish something that was completely unrelated to school, especially in June when quarantine had been in effect for over two months and I was having trouble remembering what day of the week it was.
Since finishing the bookshelves in August, I’ve made some brief forays into embroidery and origami.
Although I’ve just started to learn both, I’ve already convinced myself that I can handle extensive projects involving each medium (spoiler alert: I probably can’t). For my embroidery project, I’ve been brainstorming a quilt with several embroidered panels that I’ll sew together and then stuff with batting (the stuff that makes quilts fluffy). This project is especially close to my heart because, if I can pull it off, I will never have to buy a Christmas present for my relatives again because I can just make them quilts. If I follow my current plan, the first quilt will be beach-themed, incorporating the patterns below and a few others that are more specific to the shorepoint my family used to visit.
The origami project I have in mind is less elaborate but will likely be more time-consuming. If you’ve ever read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes , you know about the Japanese legend that states you will be granted one wish if you make a thousand paper cranes. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do with them as the paper cranes accumulate but I do hope to make one thousand of them over the next year.
Like the bookshelves, I’m sure both of the projects I’m currently planning will turn out to be very different from how I imagined them. Regardless, at the end of the process, I’ll have end products that I made myself from the ground up. Perhaps they’ll at least be good enough so that I can give them as gifts to people, such as my parents, who are basically contractually obligated to love me.