Unicorn Story
The unicorn was working as a circus freak when I met her. “No one,” she told me in a voice ravaged by theatrics and drink, “believes in innocence anymore.” (A short story and Photoshop project for the 365 art class.)
Category: Art
Art Class Update
I haven’t abandoned the art class I started back in January, but I’m moving incredibly slowly. This may have been intended as a one-year class, but I expect it’ll be a three or five year class for me, moving at this rate. Nearly 5 months in and I’m not quite to lesson 25. But instead of berating myself for my snail’s pace, I’m trying to focus on the journey. What am I learning? What am I enjoying? And from that perspective, I think this has been a success. I’m trying new things, and I’m discovering that my non-fabric creative activities …
Sporadic Art Things
As expected, I’m really bad at keeping up with my daily art assignment. Sometimes I get bogged down in the never ending to-do list. Sometimes the prompt doesn’t spark much inspiration or enthusiasm. But even if it sometimes takes me a while, so far I’ve come up with something for every prompt. My prompt this morning was to create a variation on “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Folks over in the Facebook groups for the class posted photos of their poems with drawn or painted bees. I decided to let my version just be about the words, and I enjoyed just …
Building Backgrounds
It’s not quite a portrait of Wasabi, but it might be. He’s large and grey, and he sits on windowsills and watches the world go by, kind of like this cat. This was lesson #8 from my year-long online art class, and the focus was on the technique for the background. A couple of the projects so far have focused on the background, something I haven’t really given a whole lot of thought to in this context. The lessons have been about the technique, with tiny mentions of things we might do on top of them. It’s interesting …
Without a plan
The prompt for this lesson was a quote on creativity from Alan Alda (an actor known for M*A*S*H). I’ve extracted just the part that feels most personally important: the “not quite knowing what you are doing.” I’m so accustomed to having a plan, to knowing where I am going, how I’m getting there, what I need for the journey – literally and figuratively, acting from a place of confidence. But it’s been clear to me for more than a year now that I need to do something new, and I’ve been totally stymied. I don’t have a sure-fire plan …
Trying Something New
The last art class I took was probably in high school. I don’t remember liking it much; in fact, I don’t remember much about it at all. I do still have the mouse I copied/enlarged with a grid technique (put a 1 inch grid over an existing work and render it square by square on a larger grid), but if there was more than that in a one semester class, I don’t recall. What I remember is going into class convinced I was no good at art and leaving class confirmed in that belief. Art was something you either had …