A canvas and an inkpot

Crayons.

They were once one of the most interesting things to hold and play with on all drawable surfaces. Have you ever thought why was it interesting? Was it the feeling of creating something colourful? Was it the asymmetric texture created on the canvas? Or just our natural sense of expressing doing its job?

Before learning how to write letters and numbers at school, we were handed crayons giving our flow the control to let out whatever it holds. That control made your first drawing your first declaration of your beginning.

We grow and our means of expression grow with us. Our colourful crayons grow to be inkpots with light feathers, and very limited yet deep and rich colours.

On your first canvas, you draw, and draw, and draw, and keep on drawing day after day till progress shines. Your hand is moving in all directions in exploration attempts to discover the world. As there is no hideaway from distraction nor deep zoning out, the canvas has a minor role to put you back on track and make things right. Whenever you over-draw on one area, the canvas will be shifted to re-direct you to another path, with more possibilities and more space, different opportunities with different pace, near the unknown, and way out of your comfort zone.

In the midst of the strokes, you might get lost in drawing. With discrete lines, your sense of direction is fading, your hands will try to find the way, and as always the canvas will interfere. By this time, the track is already lost.

Putting the feather aside, you can’t get a clear shape of what you have drawn. Were you distracted? Was it the ink that had you under a spell and dazzled you by its silkiness and rich colour? Was it the feather’s mesmerising fluffiness and delicacy? Were they your heavy strokes that placed high pressure on the canvas paralysing it and handcuffing it from playing its role of guidance? Falsifying them proves your innocence.

Now, it’s the canvas and the inkpot. Space and Source. Two elements falling way far from your surveillance. As we all have jobs to do, so do they. A canvas is a space that must be filled completely with all types of drawings to be hanged on walls. And an inkpot is a genuine source of rich colours needed to feed the canvas hunger.

In your one and only atelier, there are limited numbers of canvases and inkpots. Either you shake your distraction off and have a good use of them, or you’ll end up helping your neighbour decorating their walls.

It always starts with a canvas and an inkpot.