Two years ago, I believed that I had no talent for drawing at all. My sketches of people always looked flat, and I usually tore them up before anyone could see them. Last summer, an art teacher at the town's youth center advised me to stop drawing whole faces and to practice one feature at a time. First, I drew nothing but eyes for two weeks, filling page after page until they looked alive. Next, I moved on to noses and mouths, and I compared each new page with the first one in my sketchbook. Finally, I combined the features into a portrait of my younger brother, who laughed and asked to keep it. My lines were still far from perfect, yet every page in that book proved that I was improving. The experience showed me that I can trust my own progress when I am able to see it on paper.