Up on the Rig Again
The title. It sounds more poetic than “back in the saddle again.” Also not so overused.
I finished my four classes at Lake Washington Technical College last Friday, and you should all find it noteworthy that I achieved my first 4.0 quarter since grade school. Huzzah!
Two things stick with me about my time at LWTC. First, I feel like I wasted my money at Wazzu. Not my time. Those were some of the best times of my life and I don’t regret a single day in Pullman. But I blew a lot of money there on classes that I didn’t always pass.
Second, when I look at four 4.0s lined up in a nifty little column, it makes me realize just how smart I am when I’m interested in my studies. I think, “How could I have botched this up before? It’s so easy!” That’s age talking.
So here I sit with stylus in hand, busily working on my art.
It became clear to me in the last couple of months that I’ve gone about as far as I can go in the realm of cartooning. Not that I’m proclaiming myself a master, ready to start the Nate Taylor Center for Children Who Can’t Draw Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too.
Though if I did, you better believe that center would kick ass. There would be courses on Tai Chi, Beginning Romance, and Made-Up Games. All classrooms would be ball-crawls, too.
Anyway, I’m concentrating on painting now. Obviously. Just check out the front page for updates. I’ve got a ways to go, but practice makes perfect, donchaknow?
The hardest part of painting is the colors. Well, color and not having any definitive lines. Sure, I know the art world is big enough to allow for paintings with hard lines, but the coolest stuff is always devoid of linework. Like Frazetta and Brom and Dos Santos. That’s what I want to do.
Color theory is a whole problem by itself. I’m not color blind, but then again I’ve never really looked at the colors around me. If you were to ask me what color the leaves on a tree were, I’d say,
“Green.”
Ah, but what kind of green?
“Oh, a yellowish green I suppose.”
All of them?
“Well, no. There are some that have a bit of brown to them.”
What about the shadows on the leaves?
“Jeez, I don’t know. Dark green?”
That’s a snippet of my inner dialogue, by the way. I’ll go on like that for twenty minutes just staring at a tricycle and how the light bounces off the paint and the rubber. I’ve gotten more than a couple of awful glares from people in coffee shops who think I’m ogling them.
“No, I was just studying the way indoor light highlights your skin in yellow, and outdoor light makes it a desaturated blue!”
I know what a tetriadic color scheme is. That doesn’t help me pick what color to use for rocks. Painting is a completely different mental state from drawing. One highlight of all this fixation is that I’ve started dreaming in color.
Before, I didn’t necessarily dream in black-and-white, there just wasn’t any color. Strange, huh? At any rate, I’m going to be charting my progress, difficulties, and successes here as often as I can. Maybe this blog will actually have a benefit beyond stoking the fires of my own ego. Aghast!
So that’s all for now. I’ll leave you with a new vocabulary word.
Wupdate: noun, an amalgamation of “web” and “update” used to describe new content to a web page.