You're My Obsession
One Halloween when Josh was a little boy, his teacher had the kids make an art project with a ghost and taught them how to write the word "boo". Later, Josh's parents discovered that he had taken a piece of chalk and written "boo" dozens of times between their house and the school -- on the sidewalk, on mailboxes, on fences, in the middles of the street, on a car (yikes). A year or so later, Josh learned to make snowflakes in school. That December, he went through an entire ream of paper making snowflakes. Then there was the time Josh used an entire ream of paper trying to figure out how to make a Stormtrooper costume.
Not much has changed for him as an adult. For example, Josh has recently been drawing the Neomorph from Alien: Covenant. And when I say he has been drawing it, I mean it is in his sketchbook and on our computer and on his mom's iPad Pro. If I took him to a restaurant right now, he'd probably draw it on the napkins. (Maybe not if they were cloth.) And every single sketchbook of his from the 7th grade on has dozens of sketches and fully finished drawings of the Alien monster. And Spiderman. And skulls.
Josh has a bit of an obsessive streak in his personality -- not the kind where he is obsessively clean, because I should be so lucky, but the kind where when he likes something, he does it over and over and over and over again. As tedious as this can be when he is watching the same episode of MST3K for the 1000th time, it serves him well as an artist. All those hundreds, possibly thousands, of drawings of Alien have helped him perfect his rendering of that monster. And this willingness to put in the time and the practice is not limited to drawing specific characters, but also extends to practicing techniques and perfecting his craft.
Josh is a naturally gifted artist, but his abilities now are just as representative of his obsession (okay, maybe diligence is a better word) in pursuit of a passion as they are of the way God made him. In my opinion, it's a beautiful obsession and I wouldn't have him any other way.