From math to art.

As mentioned in my previous post, I started out as a math education major in college. Why did I choose math education? Isn't that the exact opposite of art? Yes, but for some reason, math was always second best for me in school. I actually did really well in it and figured since art wasn't going to work out, math would have to be my second option.

I happened to enroll in a 5 credit calculus class of doom my first semester. As I started failing the tests and whatnot, I started picking up my pencil and sketching/drawing for fun. I purchased a sketchbook and thought about art again. I kept the sketchbook, so here are a couple of drawings from it:

As you can see, the first sketch has that "expressive" style thing that I thought the high school art teacher would like (which he hated even more), and then the second drawing, which came a few weeks later, has my original drawing style. I was able to stop with that scribble weird stuff, and go back to my more refined, smooth look. Oh and the reason I sketched Nefertiti was because my roommate had a little bronze statue of her in our dorm room.

Anyway, as I dug further and further into the dreaded "F" range with the math class, I thought about switching my major, but wasn't sure how to go about doing this. I had a lot of questions like, "Will I ever be able to get an art teaching job? Do I really want to deal with the disappointment of being told I'm a terrible lazy artist?" and other anxiety fueled fears. Eventually in the spring semester I just did it. I went in and changed my major. My GPA was terrible because of the horrible grades I got in that calc class and some other math class I took the spring semester, but once I changed my major my grades went up considerably.

Since my school was impacted by budget cuts and whatnot, I actually wasn't able to take a legitimate art class until my junior year. During that time I experimented with media I hadn't really used before. I enjoyed working in acrylic paint, so I did some little paintings of things my friends would like and random stuff. 

Here are a couple examples of those beginning paintings:

Even though those are not the greatest paintings in the world, it started to get me really excited for the art classes I would be taking during my junior year and beyond. Following this post will be college class art.