With this project, I was brought to the past. More specifically, 9th grade.

If you scroll through the tag #outlines on Instagram, you’ll see amazing art from teens all around the world. When I stumbled across a post from these back in 9th grade, I was intrigued. They seemed so intricate, and I ended up scrolling through the tag for what might have been hours. After a while, I found out that the app they used was Adobe Draw. So, I downloaded it and started drawing.

Of course, while it may seem simple, to just “download it and start drawing,” it was not. I had to overcome quite a lot of obstacles. To choose a color was easy as the app had an eyedropper tool. But which brush did they use? What size of a brush did they use? How did they make it look so good? Why does mine look so bad? Moments like these, where you compare your art to others, makes you want to give up. And I did.

I’m not going to shy away from that fact. For about a week or so, I stopped making outlines. I grew tired of the repetitiveness of the outlines and seemingly not improving. That is, until an account I followed posted a tutorial on how she drew the hair. I wanted to try it out, so I found a picture of Loren Gray (She was all everyone seemed to be drawing), quickly outlined her, and tried out the tutorial. Believe it or not, it worked! I managed to draw an outline that, for once, didn’t seem so bad. So, I continued drawing them.

However, I’ve stopped drawing them, again. Why? I’ve been too busy with other things to draw them. From time to time, an outline will pop up on my Explore page on Instagram, and I’ll remember, but for now, those drawings will stay in the past. Or in the trash. I don’t have any pictures saved of those outlines since I got mad at myself for even trying and deleted them all.