My “Thing” is Art By Sahasra Ravuri a 6th grade student

My name is Sahasra Ravuri. I attend West Woods Upper Elementary school, and I love art. I started really trying to work on my people drawings and my other paintings at age 10, and now I am eleven. I draw something when I feel stressed or during my homework breaks. Drawing is my thing and I am drawing for myself. When I draw my mind attracts me towards painting a night sky/ landscapes or drawing a person. I believe that I want to draw humans and paint landscapes because of a couple of reasons. The first one being me seeing some of my friends using different ways to draw or paint, so I combine all the ways they do it and turn it into something. Even though I didn’t take my drawing seriously until one year ago I have made a lot of improvement since then. I feel that whenever I draw it should say something about me, what I like, or what I like to do. Most people draw because they have a reason to draw, my reason is usually because I'm mad or I have absolutely nothing to do. Do you know what a stress toy is? If you do, great! Drawing is my stress toy, except it can take me everywhere.

I am a very energetic and playful kid and whenever I play outside (often) I like to look around. Sometimes in the summer, I stay around until sunset and dusk and I take a picture of the landscape in my mind and try to draw or paint it. On valentines day I kept seeing drawings of best friends doing things together. Now for me, I don’t like to pick favorites, so I showed all my friends a drawing that I drew for all of them. They were all happy and said that was very kind of me to draw that. When people say that to me about my drawing I feel like a rainbow is being dumped on my head. Before, I started leaning towards the idea of becoming a doctor. I actually wanted to be a zoologist and that was because I LOVE animals, emphasizing love. So one day I decided to draw a lion, now think about this, imagine a lion's face, a male one with a mane, got it? Good. Now, think of every detail you would have to draw on the lion’s mane if you were drawing the lion. When I was in 5th grade, I didn’t think about that. I wanted to draw the lion for my dad because that is his favorite animal, but once I saw a picture for a reference I was like “nope” and chose to draw a deer.

There were always those kids who would think their work was horrible and be like “my work is the worst” when their work is like the exact replica of the thing they drew. I was kind of like that except I always thought my drawing was good and yet I kept saying “oh my god this is so bad”. I used to do this when I was younger because I wanted to feel like I was having a rainbow dumped on my head. On the other hand now I ask people if they like my drawing, even if they say they do, I try to make the next one better.