DD9 previously announced that she hated art, because she wasn't good at it. We had never decided to make this a battleground for task-avoidant perfectionism, since she had a lot more enthusiasm to work on it in other areas, like gymnastics and music. Besides, I never liked it, either... for much the same reason, it turns out. Well, DD9 decided to make it a battleground anyway, and she is turning it into a win!

Last night I came home from work to find her sketching. She told me that she decided she wanted to be good at art, and that she hated that she just drew stick figures, and she wanted to work out how to draw human forms. She had already done a couple, which were of the basic sort of thing you'd expect, one step above stick figures... faces were still very simple, the arms and legs were sticking out straight, but the rest of the shapes were more or less there. She was looking for some criticism of them, but I just asked her what she thought of them, and she did some self-critiquing without the usual "I'M SO STUPID!" that had attended that in the past.

It was her plan that really surprised me... she had several of these sketch books, and she announced that she was going to label each of them with a specific year, and work her way through them, and keep them, so she could see how she's progressing. Whoa.

The quality of her art itself is nothing to brag about, but only this community could appreciate how even being willing to tackle it is something worth talking about.

I'm convinced that her willingness to tackle art is directly related to some notable successes she's had in both gymnastics and music lately.