When I was about 14 years old or so I discovered I loved to draw. I never really had a particular interest before then. My older sister was good at art. I was intimidated by her creativity – so I settled on copying other people’s work. I was pretty decent at it – I’d spend whole weekends with a sketchbook and pencils copying pictures from my favourite cartoons – Asterix, Footrot Flats, Donald Duck, and The Swamp. I was a big Doctor Who fan at the time, and had a 20th anniversary book with lots of graphics of monsters. I also used to copy these. My bedroom walls were covered with A3 paper with multiple images on them. Some have survived the nearly 40 years in between and are shown below.

I was not so good at drawing people though. I tried to avoid this as much as possible. The exaggerated features in comics, or as monsters somehow seemed easier to me and at the time. So, I stayed well within my comfort zone.

In my last two years of school I decided to study art. This was the first time I stretched myself creatively, and my intrinsic self-consciousness got the better of me. I didn’t like to work big because a lot of people would see what I was up to. I was surrounded by people who worked in large sweeping strokes, creating pieces that showed their confidence in themselves. My perception was that everyone was better than me.

In my very last semester, I decided to push myself. I attacked the human form. My entire portfolio was based on human shapes, faces and movement. I poured my heart and soul into it. All the work in portfolio remained small.

It was around this time one of my teachers told me I was probably looking at a “C” and maybe I was just better at other subjects, like maths or science. I wasn’t. I went back into my shell.

At home I had happily taken to producing badly drawn cartoons of our household pets. My mother seemed to want the entire food chain represented by our pets, so every day was an endless stream of animals trying to eat each other. OK, slight exaggeration, but not far off.

The drawing was terrible, but we had a lot of fun personifying the animals – the cats in particular. Tyrone was a grumpy old Burmese who had a permanent limp following surgery on his foot. Becky was seriously the dumbest cat on the face of the planet. My sister’s cat (Ally) was constantly seeking attention. There were more cats, dogs, budgies … you get the idea.

The silly cartoons continued as I embarked on University. I used to draw scenes and make up puns to help me remember the things I couldn’t understand. By the time I reached the final year of my PhD, I would leave badly drawn puns on my supervisor’s whiteboard. She liked them enough to ask if a contact of hers from a publication called Chemical Innovation had any interest to publish them. They did. As an example of the type of work that got published, below is the first cartoon I had accepted. A car bean, a play in the word carbene. It’s terrible right? This less than 30 second picture earned me $75.

Around this time I discovered if I anthropomorphise molecules and glassware, and put them in human situations (like I did with cats), I would invariably get a laugh. So when I started to teach, I tried to use this to my advantage. I would prepare cartoons specifically for new concepts (see below). Sometimes I would even make a joke up in class and quickly draw it on the overhead transparency or blackboard.

The more I showed the cartoons, the less self conscious I became. Finally in 2007, ChemScrapes was launched (thanks to Prof Brian Halton). The rest is history.

I am still very good at copying. I am still bad at drawing people. Where I excel is scrappiness. I am very comfortable in this world and I like to think it shows in the work.

Nowadays, when I look at my old art portfolio, I get where my teacher was coming from. There is no joy in that work. There is no spirit. It is symptomatic of a person trying too hard to be an artist, rather than focusing on being himself. My “C” grade was really a reflection of my inability to break free of the constraints I had put on myself. In a funny way my teacher got it right.

I have come to realise that creativity isn’t just about being great at art, or music, or any one thing in particular. Creativity can also come combining whatever attributes you have to do something different. There is always someone “built better”, but no-one is you! If I have learned anything through running ChemScrapes, it is that out of imperfection often comes uniqueness. You just have to find your thing and let it come out.