No one really teaches you how to be an artist. All of a sudden you kind of are one. You're the best one in your family (although I was not), then you're the best one in your class, then you're the best one in larger and larger arenas even though you are convinced you could be better.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad showed me these three illustrations he had done. They were black ink on a piece of glossy cardboard. I remember one illustration of a man at a desk with a mushroom cloud, and that's about all I really remember of it. It had dates and names and words on it, but I have no recollection beyond that. My dad told me that when he was in school, he wasn't a great student so the teacher would let him do these little political cartoons to show he was paying attention. I wish I could remember them better but all these years later they've faded into the back corners of this memory. I was really fascinated that he accomplished a task, his homework, with art. And not just that his art sufficed as the equivalent of the task, but that he had convinced someone of that.
It wasn't long before I was getting out of class work in grade school by asking the teacher if I could help with the boards. I was creating these construction paper masterpieces on the front and back bulletin boards. It was a real shame that, in spite of these grade school Sistine chapels I was creating, my teachers still stapled everyone's homework over it. It is then that I learned about the customer/artist relationship: Once you give them the art for a price, (in my case, the price was getting out of schoolwork), it belongs to them.