Ammon Age 17

“Because I am a natural dreamer, I lose myself in reality- because I get bored very easily and I have a short attention span. [Making art] is like recreating entire worlds on the page. But I am not going to publish my work because I don’t actually want to grow up to be an artist because my mom officially crushed my dreams about that when I was younger. That’s a half joke. It’s kinda sorta true. See when I was like 6 or 7 she was like “Artists don’t make a lot of money”. I was like “Really? OK.” Because despite wanting to do it for personal reasons I also want to get paid and survive. So I was like, no art then. I mean, she said I should have a back up plan but what I heard was “quit”.

But at the same time it’s still extremely fun to do and it calms me down…I don’t know why. It’s a relaxing practice. And if feels awesome to learn to draw something you didn’t know how to draw before. It took me forever to learn how to draw hands instead of circles with sticks coming out of them. And I started to get a little better over the years until finally I could draw human hands after drawing mine for about 3 hours. But I still can’t draw cars… I’m terrible at drawing cars. I can draw a cube, a little prism, but not a car.

In truth, when I get older…I’m talking about much older like when I finish college. I probably would just draw on the side and publish my works. It wouldn’t have to garner any success or anything.

I mean, that’s the thing…I’m probably never going to stop drawing.”