A last minute entry for the July CBPC. I'm not sure I really like how it turned out, but here it is.
Disclaimer: I still don't own them.
She could remember the first time she had held a professional sketch pad in one hand, and professional charcoal pencils in the other. It was when she was nine years old, and her parents had finally started to appreciate her healthy talent as an artist.
In fact, she distinctly remembered, that time was when she first decided that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with pencils and sketch book in hand. That decision- though made quite young- changed the things that she did with her extra time. It was, in fact, a catalyst for her to focus solely on her art.
And focus on her art she did. From there on out, she worked on her pictures before she went to bed at night, any time she had before she went to school in the morning, at school during free periods and art class, and during her lunch time. She submitted her work to art contests, and art fairs. She even started selling the prints to local shops to earn the cash that she needed; that way, she didn't have to baby-sit, and therefore had more time to play with her art.
Doing things like that got her through junior high, and most of the way through high school. By the time she was a senior, she was applying for all sorts of scholarships to help pay her way to college. The number of responses she got was astounding, and left her parents paying for hardly anything.
In college, she drifted away from her art for a while. There were so many new things to dry her freshman year- and so many new boys to have flings with.- that her pencils and paper sat useless and lifeless in a corner. Then, after one particularly tough semester, her passion for the art came flooding back. That was all that she could do; she had become consumed again.
By then she was a junior, and she had to start deciding what she was going to do with her life. She hadn't decided if she was going to graduate school or not, and hadn't decided what she would major in anything if she did go. The only thing that interested her was her knack for drawing, but her parents warned her against becoming an artist.
"Just watch," her over-bearing mother would tell her on the phone, "you drop out of college to be some hippy artist, and you'll never make any money, or anything of yourself. Don't ruin your chance at a good life by chasing some wild dream that might not get you very far."
Of course, this angered her beyond words. How dare her mother- the one person that was supposed to support her daughter in everything- tell her not to go after what she wanted! Her mother should have been telling her that if she wanted to be some 'hippy artist' that she should damned well be that artist!
And so, maybe to subconsciously infuriate her mother in turn, she decided not to go to graduate school. Instead she decided to pursue a career that she had heard of a long time ago: forensic drawing.
Please don't forget to tell me what you think!
Charlotte