One Piece of Art at a Time

As a young girl, I was a creative thinker and writer. My third grade teacher at Taft Primary Elementary assigned my friend Heidi and I as class storytellers. Every week we were challenged to create a new story (or add to an existing story) through words crafted with D’Nealian penmanship and our own hand-illustrations. We were given big pieces of Pepto-Bismol-Pink card stock and those fat-lead art pencils. Lucky for me, my desk was close to the pencil sharpener, as I liked my handwriting to be neat and tidy and because I didn’t really think of myself as an artist so much, there was a lot of erasing when it came to my illustrations.

At home, life itself was creative. My parents made our home…