Drawing by Eliseo A. Aurellado

Filipino Warrior

I am an accountant and have long been in private industry. Now that I am approaching my retirement years (I haven’t retired from business yet although I am already 69 years old), I have always wanted to take up the hobby of sketching and painting.

Since I was little, I used to make my own comic books, papering old notebooks (not the digital ones) with my own illustrations and stories that I made up. My father used to be amazed at the drawings my kid brother and I used to put on the side of his desk with our pencils but he didn’t scold us for messing up his furniture because he was also into art. Comic books especially Classics Illustrated and DC comics (Marvel came later) inspired us a lot to dabble into art. Joe Kubert was a favorite and so was Russ Manning. In our own culture, we also followed Filipino artists like Francisco Coching and Nestor Redondo.

What I want most of all is to hone my art. I know there is latent talent there that I just need to uncover. Portraiture is something that interests me as well as depicting historical events in large canvasses. But my rendering of human anatomy as well as facial expression is crude and unsophisticated. I would like to learn the nuances of great creative art, similar to how the old masters did it so that I can make great portraits and paint big historical events. Who knows I may have a future in art in my twilight years.

Drawing Academy has rekindled my interest in art. I always learn better at my own pace and in my own time and it seems to me that Drawing Academy would be a great course to follow. I have seen some of the pointers that Drawing Academy puts out to its subscribers and some of the free videos and they are truly very helpful. Winning the competition would of course help me a lot without me having to shell out the dollars which translated in our own currency is quite a sizeable sum.

I hope people will vote for me if only to help me fulfill a boyhood dream of becoming a good artist.