Art School, or lack there of..

I've always wanted to be an artist. I think this roots in the fact that my mother is an artist, and I was one of those kids that always wanted to do what one of my parents did. Somehow I ended up doing what my dad did when he graduated highschool, but that's another rant for another time.
Another part of it has to do with being hit with the creative branch. Not just a light tap either. I was beaten into submission with it. I write, draw, play a couple instruments, and dabble in a lot of things creatively. Dabble. Not productively take part in, but piddle around in different puddles of creative stuff.

One of my main things though is slice of life comic strips. I've been writing and drawing them since middle school, mostly out of boredom during studyhall. These weren't your everyday notebook doodles. I wrote full on strips. Every day. For every situation. Perhaps one day, I'll sit down and "re-master" them and get them published. Eh.

My family has been fairly supportive of this endeavor fortunately. However, there's a nice catch with having an artist as a parent. Specially if you belong to a family where one has a bit more dominance than the other. In my case, my dad had other ideas of what he thought I should be doing with all of my creativity. Where I wanted to go to art classes, he thought I ought to be in marching band. It got kind of interesting when it came down to scheduling my classes.
It would almost be like that scene in Harry Potter when Uncle Vernon digs into Hagrid about going to Hogwarts. My dad would get all obstenent saying "She will not be going!" His face would be red, and he'd suddenly have a british accent.

Ok, not really, but somehow he got it into his head that my mother who has about as much of an attention span as I do, would find the time to sit down and teach me how to paint. That what little instruction she was able to give me between working at Wal*Mart, and doing other motherly type dutes, would be sufficient enough to make me as awesome as her. So that was his main reason for insisting that I go down the path of music instead of picture making.

This isn't to say that I despise my years of playing trumpet and french horn, but I really wanted to have that concentrated teaching put into my art.

So I have been pretty much left to learn on my own. I mean, I suppose I could take some classes at a workshop, but like art school, that costs money. Money that I do not have.