Learning to Draw During COVID

By Millie Ford

PROMPT—During Covid-19 ...

It was a hard time to be a hypochondriac. Daily death tolls geysering all over the country. Refrigerated trucks as temporary morgues. Images of a red-ball virus with suckers reaching out, waiting to grasp onto any hapless bystander like sticky burrs latching onto the pant legs of someone who was innocently walking through a field, unaware of the burdock weeds.

It was, however, an easy time to be an introvert. The COVID lock-down meant peace. Being home didn’t bother me; I actually preferred it. My new best friend, the Amazon delivery person, brought me everything I needed, even groceries right to my front door. I didn’t have to risk my health by going to a store where someone would inadvertently cough on the grocery cart I used, or sneeze on the oat milk I needed to buy. I wore latex gloves to bring the packages into my house. I wiped everything down with disinfectant wipes, everything except the apples.

There was a problem, though. If I were going to be home bound, I needed a new hobby. I have been knitting for years. I usually knit while watching television, something to keep my hands busy, and when the pandemic started, I was constantly knitting, making blankets and cat beds. Since I wasn’t going out, I watched reruns of my favorite medical shows: ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy. It didn’t take much to convince me that I had Right Ventricular Dysplasia, Primary Biliary Cholangitis, or Necrotizing Fasciitis. Press conferences, conflicting newscasts, and interviews with healthcare professionals were the footsteps of the COVID dirge, continuously getting louder in my head.

Every day, I was certain of my demise. I was in the age range most susceptible to the virus. I feared my Amazon best friend would be forced to call the fire department after a few days when packages piled up on my porch. A first responder would find me dead on the living room floor wearing a tomato-stained hoodie, the mark of the frozen pizza I ate for my last meal. And my cat Isaac, who was once feral, who ignored the cat beds and blankets I made for him, what would happen to Isaac? It took two years to get him used to me, and I bribed him with yummy treats. The fire department would find him hiding under the bed, along with used Kleenex, dust hippopotamuses, and disastrous purchases I wanted to forget. If a strange hand reached under the bed, Isaac would bite. Hell, if I reached under the bed and tried to grab him, Isaac would bite me. I needed to stop watching COVID updates, people who played doctors on TV, newscasts reporting shortages of toilet paper, and think of something else to do.

Working out? No. I didn’t feel safe going to the gym even with a mask. Walking through the neighborhood? Maybe when the weather got warmer. The cat shelter where I volunteered placed all their cats in foster homes. Coffee houses, where I would meet my friends, were closed to indoor seating. Clean out the pantry and the closets, not going to happen. I prefer to keep my chaos neatly hidden behind closed doors. But watching TV while knitting was not good for my mental health. When I pondered some options, I remembered I used to doodle during meetings when I was nervous or bored. I also took a drawing class a few years ago, Perhaps a drawing class could be the perfect prescription for my COVID panic.

When I was working, doodling was a way to keep my mind busy, to keep me from saying something in meetings I might later regret. Volunteering for a project, pointing out someone’s error, asking an irrelevant question, all could be seen as career limiting moves. Doodling helped keep me employed.

It was fifteen years before COVID when I took a drawing class at the University of Chicago extension. It was a time when I was determined to do something in addition to work. In the six-week class, we learned the basics: line, contrasts, highlights, and shadows. I was excited about going to a real art supply store to get the recommended assortment of pencils (we weren’t taking a test, so a standard #2 pencil wasn’t enough), erasers – regular and kneaded, a smudge stick, charcoal, and a drawing pad. But no pencil sharpener. We sharpened our pencils with an X-Acto knife. This was hard core.

The classroom was small, almost claustrophobic, and the tables where students normally sat were set in a U-shape. The teacher was young, probably fulfilling a course requirement. He would place items on a table in the middle of the room, boxes, baskets, candles, and we drew the landscapes he created. He walked around and helped, me more than others, but if he made the right line, I could usually follow and produce something resembling the scene. Three classroom hours each week, two forty-five minute drives, I was persistent . . . but I wasn’t having fun. For our final project, we added colored pencils to our toolbox, and I drew a banana. I started with yellow and orange for the skin, bright yellow to show where the light hit, blended in brown and green for the stem, and finally used purple for the shadows. Six weeks, over $700 spent on class fees, supplies, and parking, and I drew a banana. It was a beautiful banana. I never thought about serious drawing again, until now.

I thought the combination of lock-down and retirement would be the perfect time to start drawing again. Yes, I would be trading one screen for another since I planned to take on-line classes for drawing. I am glad I didn’t spend a lot on the class or the supplies. I wasn’t really good, and worse than that, I still didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t interested enough in practicing to get good. It’s one thing to be in a live class where a teacher can give recommendations and there is interaction with the other students. It’s quite another to be watching a video, at home alone, with a cat who just tolerated me.

I watched a class showing the steps to draw a face. Before we started, the instructor talked about perfect circles, equal proportions, the centers of the pupils in line with the horizontal center of the face. I was determined to do this, but I stumbled badly at the second step. A benefit of prerecorded classes is the ability to stop, pause, and rewind without criticism from the instructor or snide looks from the other students.

1. Draw an X in the center of the paper (Did it).
   

2. Use your pinky to press down on the X, hold the pencil normally on the paper, turn the paper around to draw a perfect circle around the X. After four tries, I got something resembling a circle.
   

3. Use your pinky to hold the paper against the outer edge and draw a vertical line through the circle. I was not even going to try repeating this step, because I’d have to draw the circle again. I got a wavy line and decided it will have to do.

   
   

4. Draw a horizontal line through the circle, using the X as a guide.

I kept on going through the lesson, but at the end, my face didn’t look anything like the face on the screen. The left eye was too far left, the chin was too short, and the nose. Let’s forget about the nose for a moment. I thought the eyes would be easy. All those years of drawing eyeliner in the pre-dawn, get-ready-for-work hours did not help at all. My eyes were crooked.

As I looked at the result, I wondered how the great artists learned. Did Rembrandt use a protractor and a ruler to capture the depth of human emotion? Did Picasso learn ratios and memorize steps before he decided an ear belonged on a forehead? What about Georgia O’Keefe? Did a study of photosynthesis help her express nature’s seduction and our soul’s connection with it? From what I remember from my Art History class in college, Leonardo de Vinci used mathematical principles in his art, but there was more than geometry. People have talked about the Mona Lisa for centuries. The intrigue de Vinci portrayed didn’t come from science. He had talent and passion. Great artists see things other people don’t. They have a burning, all-consuming desire to record their vision. Their work elicits unexpected feelings in others. Every cell in their beings vibrates with inspiration. Maybe learning to draw was a way for me to express my feelings, but without skill and the tenacity to practice, my drawing lessons ended quickly.

I don’t remember drawing much as a kid. My school pictures were rarely hung on the bulletin board. Once, a teacher tried to show me how to slow down when I colored near the lines, to help me stay inside the arbitrary boundaries. Take my green crayon painstakingly around each leaf on a tree. What a waste of time. Later that year, I tried hard to stay within the lines, slowed down, paid attention to each detail. The teacher looked at my picture and said, “This is so much better,” as if the victory was hers, not mine. But, I finally got a picture on the bulletin board, the only one because the next time, I took the green crayon in my fist and drew connecting curlicues and lightning bolts across the space where the leaves were outlined. Years later, I would think about this work as “essence of leaf.”

Even though I wasn’t an artist (or perhaps because I was a failed artist), I admired visual arts of all kinds. Painting, photography, stained glass. I even considered high fashion as an art form. When Project Runway debuted, I wondered if I found my creative calling. Fashion. I looked nice when I went out of the house, not necessarily “fashionable,” but respectfully utilitarian. Could I design high fashion and still look like, well, me? Once again, Project Runway inspired me. Judge Michael Kors wore jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black blazer all the time. Perhaps a female designer should look like she might possibly one day wear her designs, but maybe, I could get away with a more invisible look, let my clothing designs express my creativity.

Before the pandemic, I was on a job interview for a retail marketing position when I was asked, “If you couldn’t do this job, what would you like to do?” I knew the right answer. I knew what I was supposed to say. There were many avenues for me to choose, big data analysis, consumer insights, brand management. “I’d like to be a fashion designer,” popped out of my mouth.

What’s wrong with that answer? I was interviewing at a time when there were too many applicants for each job, and hiring managers were looking for reasons to reject candidates. Driving home after the interview, I didn’t wonder if my answer was inappropriate given the parameters of the job. Instead, I considered a more fundamental problem. I can’t draw. I don’t wear haute couture. I know very little about fabric, and I can’t sew. I can iron well, but somehow, I doubt ironing would carry me into a career with icons like Coco Chanel and Diane Von Furstenberg.

I wanted to be a fashion designer so I could have something interesting to draw for the times I’m bored in meetings. When someone in Finance presented a slide with far too many numbers for anyone to absorb, when they talked about an unfavorable product mix generating an increase in gross sales but a reduction in net profits, I wanted to scream. Instead, I turned my mind to evening wear. I imagined a beautiful dusty blue dress made of flowy material, a pleated collar, a jeweled belt. Once I tried to draw it, and it looked ridiculous.

I don’t think about being a fashion designer anymore. I’m retired. I don’t have to look nice for anyone. I don’t shop either. I am comfortable for myself, despite what all those TV make-over shows say. I wear t-shirts, turtlenecks, yoga pants, and hoodies. I buy my clothes from Amazon now. Haven’t stepped into Nordstrom in years.

I’ve taken up reading as my second hobby, shoveling through the snow drifts of books on every flat surface of my house. I’m snuggled up on the couch with a book, my cat believing he is at a safe distance away, and I’m wearing a t-shirt, yoga pants and a hoodie, COVID Couture.

But after reading for a while, I wondered if I could take all the emotions swirling around in me like a shaken snow globe and write. I wrote in college, and I loved it, tragic teen-aged histrionics, notwithstanding. With my laptop, I opened Word and typed, “Once, there was. . ..,” and my journey as a writer began. A little over five years, and I’m still writing. Classes, workshops, writing groups. I’ve met wonderful people online and have been introduced to a wide array of authors, some who have become my favorites. Even though I might get the occasional case of writer’s block, I come to the blank page with confidence. I don’t have time for unnecessary worry. I have a regular writing practice, one that sustains me in sickness and in health.

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Millie Ford began writing creative non-fiction after a successful career in corporate marketing. She loves creating unique imagery and using powerful metaphors to communicate complex emotional states. She has been published in The Write Launch, HerStry, and in two anthologies, Storytellers’ True Stories About Love, Volume 2 and Turning Points Life’s Twists and Turns. She lives in Illinois with her rescue cat, Isaac.