Ashley White, age 14, started drawing when she was four years old, but she threw away all of her work from this period of her life.

“I thought the pictures were ugly,” she confides.

The young artist says that now she realizes she should not have tossed them out. Just this year Ashley started keeping most of the pictures she draws. Back in the fifth grade when Ashley was 11 years old, she won the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District Bookmark Contest. She drew an original design on a bookmark, and it was selected by library staff as one of nine winning entries among the 6,318 entries submitted.

Ashley’s love of art cannot be defined by numbers, although she does not mind if one day her talents will help to make her rich. “I know that I always want art in my life, and I want to make money as well,” says Ashley.

Although she has never had any formal training, Ashley has taken some art classes in school just for fun. This past year, she served as a teaching assistant for her seventh grade art class at Cascade Middle School.

Ashley’s favorite materials to draw with are a plain old number two pencil and a shader, as well as any kind of paper as long as it is white and unlined. She mostly likes to draw fairies, dragons, and also people.