FIQWS 10113-HA15                   Wilfreddy Suarez

“How Art Changed My Life”

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before” – Neil Gaiman. My name is Wilfreddy Suarez and I’m a freshman at The City College of New York. I’ve had art around me for many years, so much that it has become a part of my life. Art is important to me because it helped me with depression and made me meet amazing people in my life.

During my transition to middle school, the only thing I enjoyed doing was playing video games. But like kids these days, I had started to get depression and playing video games to calm it down didn’t work most of the time. When my middle school started doing an optional afterschool program I signed up for an art class, but with no interest in doing art. The other classes I could have chosen were Reading, English, and Writing. I wouldn’t have enjoyed those options, so I had to choose the art class. It was a small room, about 6 long tables arranged in 2 rows, the lights were always off and we let a bit of light come in through the windows. The art teacher was a tall woman, in her 30s or 40s, she had long and curly brunette hair and blue eyes. Also in the class, there were two of my friends Brandon, Brianna and 3 other people I didn’t know. After a few weeks pass of drawing whatever we wanted and playing around, my friend Brandon was drawing something and it looked cool and amazing. That’s when he introduced me to anime; Which are hand-drawn and computer-animated cartoons that originated from Japan. Brandon recommended me some anime to watch and I instantly fell in love with it, I wanted to start drawing just like the animes that I had watched, that’s when I finally found a new passion. I got really immersed and attached to the different types of art styles and stories anime had to offer. So instead of being at home, playing video games and not talking to other people, having that type of art that I enjoyed made me open up a little and have something in common with others. It made me want to draw more and more until I got on par with anime, I had that mindset through my 6th to 8th year in middle school. But sadly after trying so hard, no matter what I did, I couldn’t make a single drawing. But when I enrolled in high school, everything changed for the better.

When I got to high school, it was completely different from middle school. I had stopped drawing because after trying so many times in middle school, I couldn’t draw anything. Once I met my three friends, Lakshmi, Joey, and Yulong everything changed; We were in a large art class with 10 long tables that were arranged in a square shape. After I met my friends, the dim light that I had for drawing got relit even brighter than before. They were all decent at drawing while I was not, but they helped and persuaded me to not give up and to keep practicing and practicing until I get better at drawing. I followed their advice and slowly but surely I did get better but only a little. I kept going at it for weeks and weeks until I was finally able to draw anime pictures and I put my new talent to good use by helping me pass all my art classes. During my 9th to 12th grades of high school, I was only drawing pictures that I found on google. I wanted my drawing skills to grow even better, but I didn’t know-how. Recently, that changed when I headed to college.

For the past year, I’ve been lazy in figuring out how to make my own drawings. Every time I see anime or other peoples drawing, I always wondered how they make those amazing drawings. Then I remembered the advice my middle school friends told me, practice. If I just kept practicing and practicing then I’ll be able to draw something from my own imagination. I started sketching eyes, hands, etc and I enjoyed doing it because it was coming from my mind. I’m not gonna lie I even practice in my notebooks during class. A few days later, after all that sketching and practicing, I decided to finally draw my own character. I tried really hard to draw it and to my surprise the character I made actually turned out decent. After that drawing, I thought to myself, if I keep practicing I could start drawing even more amazing things, and that made me happy. Art is really important to me, I can draw how I feel or just whatever I want to draw. Because of art, I met some amazing people that I could rely on, even call family. Art to me is mostly a hobby, it’s not something that I want to have as a job or anything but I do enjoy drawing and I hope I could get even better at it. 

Art is important to me because it helped me become more confident in meeting people in my life with the same interest and because it made into the person I am today. I agree with the quote given by Neil Gaiman because when I made my very own character from scratch, I was really proud of what I had drawn and it made me not give up because now I know that I could do it and that I could grow and draw even better.