There is no worse feeling (in art school anyway) than throwing your work up for a class critique and knowing INSTANTLY that your piece is the worst one out of everybody’s.

I have just come from such a critique.

I’m in three classes – Drawing 3, Life Drawing (which is a fancy name for drawing naked people), and Survey of Illustration. The two drawing courses are going very well and I’m really excited about my projects so far.

However, the survey class is my first class in my illustration major, and it was listed as a lecture, with no actual art projects due and no studio prerequisite classes, but in practice the professor is requiring actual paintings. I’ve been a little nervous about this since the first day, because I am the only person in the class who doesn’t know anyone else, ie. who hasn’t taken any illustration classes yet.

SO, tonight was the night of our first project critique. I created a drawing that was possibly the ugliest thing I, or anyone else in the history of everything, have ever created, but I had misunderstood the instructions and thought that this was sort of the point. We were illustrating creation myths from primitive cultures, and I thought that the EXECUTION, not just the subject, of the project, was supposed to be primitive as well.

Um, NO.

I threw my drawing up on the wall and immediately knew it was the worst. Thank god my name was called sort of early on, so that I could get the ass-reaming out of the way early. After class I was on my way out and the professor very nicely stopped me and told me that I would be fine for the rest of the class; I should just resubmit the drawing with the new instructions. I asked whether it was okay that this is my first class within the major and she assured me that it was, and that I would be fine. Very nice of her.

Then I hurried to my car, tore the drawing up into a thousand pieces so I’d never have to look at its ugliness ever again, left the car to throw the pieces away into the nearest trash can, returned to my car, shut the door, and screamed repeatedly as loudly as I could, until I felt better about being humiliated in front of twelve strangers.

Then I returned home, ordered a ginormous pizza from Papa Johns, and poured myself a ginormous glass of very cheap shiraz.

This will be the rest of my evening. This, and planning out how I am going to redo the drawing.