Wonky Lines | How Learning to Draw Twigs Helped Me Find My Worth

I have a small scar on my face from a blackboard duster. For thirty years, I thought it marked me as someone who couldn't create anything beautiful. I was wrong.

A Small branch on the tree of life

The memory is imprinted like spilled ink - its trails and splashes dotted about my mind. I was fourteen, sitting in Mr Powell’s art class. The task seemed simple enough: draw three things - a twig, a bunch of grapes, and a loaf of bread. But my pencil wouldn’t cooperate. The translation became blurred, stuck somewhere between what I heard and saw, my brain’s interpretation of the information, along my arm and into the pencil. Lost in translation.

When I couldn’t produce what he wanted, the duster came flying across the room, catching me square in the face. The poisonous venom fell off his tongue like boulders raging down a mountain: “You’re absolutely useless, just like your mother. You can’t and will never do anything right.”

Yes, you read that right. And yes, those are the actual words of an adult, male tutor to his female, teenage student who couldn’t draw “simple lines.” I don’t know if he knew or ever met my mother - she very seldom set foot on school property. But that’s another story.

All eyes were on me. Then laughter erupted, like applause at the end of a concert performance - except I was the joke, not the performer.

For decades, those words resided in my bones. They became the voice in my head that whispered, “you're not artistic” and “you could never do this” every time I saw a beautiful sketch or watched someone paint. They were the reason I never picked up a pencil, never tried, never believed I could create anything worth looking at.

Then my six-year-old asked me a question that changed everything.

“Mummy, can we draw together?”

Such a simple request, delivered with that gentle innocence only children possess. But the floodgates opened, and I was dragged back into that classroom, feeling the weight of all those watching eyes, hearing their cruel laughter. My first instinct was to say no, to make an excuse, to protect both of us from my inevitable failure.

But something in his eager face stopped me. He didn’t know I “couldn't” draw. He just knew he wanted to create something with his mum.

So, I picked up the pencil.

Every crooked, uneven line I drew felt like evidence of Mr Powell’s words. But my son didn’t see failure - he saw his mum trying something new. He celebrated my wobbly circles and crooked lines as if they were masterpieces worthy of an oscar. His joy was infectious, and slowly, something began to shift.

They were really wonky lines, scratched onto the page by a nervous, perspiring mother, desperate to experience a joyful, bonding moment with her child, without crumbling. As a mother and former teacher, I know first-hand how critical and brutally honest children can be.

I started drawing twigs.

It wasn’t conscious at first. But there I was, day after day, sketching branches and bark, leaves and roots. Perhaps it was my way of going back to that moment, of proving to that terrified fourteen-year-old that she could do this one simple thing. Or perhaps it was just that twigs, in their natural imperfection, felt safe to attempt.

I’ve been drawing twigs for ten years now. Ten years of quiet determination, of refusing to let his voice be the final word on what I could create. And you know what ‘'ve discovered?

I can actually draw. Not perfectly, and certainly not like the artists in galleries, but beautiful interpretations that flows across the pages, in my own special style.

My sketches have grown from hesitant scratches to confident studies of nature. I've learned to see the way light catches bark, how branches twist and reach, the delicate veining of leaves, and the keloid growths left behind on lopped trees.

I've created pin cushions that are tiny works of art, and quilts that tell stories in fabric and thread. One of my quilt blocks was selected by Liberty London and hangs in their flagship store as part of "The Patchwork Collective, 150 years of Liberty". Not bad for one who “can’t”!

The real victory isn’t in any particular piece I’ve made or drawn. It’s in the quiet moments when I pick up my pencil now and feel only possibility. It’s in the way creativity has become my anchor during life’s storms, my way of finding calm when everything else feels chaotic.

Mr Powell was wrong about everything. His cruelty said nothing about my abilities and everything about his own failures as a teacher,  as a person. Those children who laughed? They were simply following his lead, as children often do.

The truth is - creativity isn’t about meeting someone else’s standards or drawing exactly what you’re told to draw. It’s about finding your own voice, your own way of seeing and interpreting the world, your own unique path to peace.

I still have that scar on my face. But now when I catch sight of it in the mirror, I don’t think about the duster or the laughter. I think about the twigs, branches and full trees I’ve learned to draw, the quilts I’ve sewn, the art I create simply because it brings me joy.

I also think about my son, who saw possibility where I only saw limitation and fear. It was he who reminded me that the most important voice in any creative endeavour is my own.

If you’ve been carrying around someone elses cruel words about what you can’t do, I hope you feel encouraged, and empowered to pick up a pencil or your choice of creative, today.

Start with a wonky line, because very few things in life, or nature are perfectly straight. I should know – I’ve been studying them for some time now.

I have been known to spend “perfectly good time, staring at a tree.”

You might be surprised by what grows from there.

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