No AI was used in any research, creative decisions or editing decisions that went into the writing of the following:
I've been drawing my entire life since before I can remember.
My best guess as to when I started is as soon as I was physically able
to pick up the art supplies and put
them to paper or whatever material I was using at the time. I was the kid who
in daycare, if they brought out a craft set and said “This is how you do it” the
first time I would do it the so called right way and then that was just the first time it
wasn't unusual for me to do two and three and more different variations
with that craft set and they weren't never the same.
At eight years old or so I noticed a children's exhibit at a local art
show. And since I already love to draw I wanted in. It was for children
who were a few years older than me. So I just kept drawing because I
already liked to draw & that was all I could do until I got to be a bit older.
However, when my earthly father heard about this, what that made very clear
to me is here I was I had only $1 A week allowance coming in. The entry fee as far
as I can remember at that time was about $25 for three pictures
and we would discuss the rent for the pens only after, I don't remember if it was only after I had
entered, or only after I had sold something, but either way, I wasn't going in knowing all the numbers
up front and being told, by the way, it's a minimum of six months allowance plus fees on top of that.
So in effect it's the same thing when you tell an eight year old girl that you're
telling them “you're not allowed to make money with your art”
What was ironic about all of that was that as I was being effectively forbidden
from making any money from it, I was being encouraged to pursue it as a hobby.
At age seven. I had been diagnosed with an incurable medical problem that I
had had since birth. Most children who have this medical problem to the severity
that I have it can't speak at all. And yet, I was speaking younger than most
children. Unlike most people who have this condition I was able to get my
driver's license now I did get it late and at age 20, And I got it passing
the driver's test the first time.
I had so many problems in school that in high school I just simply had to be
home-schooled part time, cognitively I was slightly ahead of my peers at the
time but it didn’t change the fact that I was just simply having a lot of
problems in school that most kids didn’t have. I still became the first
student in several years who was a special needs or Special Ed student to
actually take the most advanced drawing classes that that high school offered.
It was also during that time that I was introduced to some incredibly basic
web design and some of the computer graphics courses while everyone wanted
to see me take my computer skills to the next level. One thing nobody wanted
to see me do ever was actually practice those computer skills outside of
either the classroom or being someone else's employee. So not shockingly
I never got that good at programming.
When I was in my early 20s. I actually did have a job for a while I had it
under special circumstances, and I learned in that time that being employed
was just not a viable option for me. There was a lot of very destructive stuff
that went on with my health. There was a lot of stuff where I finally had to
sit down and do the math on how much I could make and I had to realize I was
in effect going to destroy my health to never be able to support myself.
If I continued down the road of trying to be someone else's employee it didn't
matter what I was doing. It did not matter if I got more training. It didn't
matter what that training was. There was no version of events where I was going
to do anything other than destroy my health to not be able to support myself if
I continued down that road.
So at age 22 What do you do with that? Especially if you're not content to with
poor for the rest of your life? And believe me, I wasn't.
It turns out you pick the one thing you love and the one thing you know how to do
and could see yourself continuing to do pretty much regardless of what else is
going on in life as long as you have the time and the energy. And you say how
can I turn it into any chance whatsoever to make money even if I make nothing?
How can I give myself the chance? How can I make anything in my life better,
or at least put myself in a position to do so.
Now that whole thing at age 22 was more of a solidification of something that had
been coming for a long time and the thought process and the formation of the idea
of what I'd like to do with it. That started much earlier but the end result was that in 2012
I started espdigiart.com and since then I've gone on to do a
lot of fun things with my artwork, and I know that I have many
more of us in things with my art yet to come.
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E. S. Pfahl
