I try too hard to work on crap.

Yeah, even I don’t know what I’m doing or talking about at times, but I know I try too hard on an idea only to end up ruining it. A sales representative came by the shop a week or so ago to get my boss to buy their product. Nothing new, she’s got some sales reps she likes (especially those who are awesome enough to buy everyone at the shop lunch when he’s lunching with a teacher down the street), but like all sales reps, this guy was giving us free samples to try out. So naturally, I got to play with some products that I had never used before. The main thing he was trying to sell were water soluble stuff, like watercolor pencils. Things you can draw with and then add water to make it look like a painting of sorts. I don’t know, I’ve tried the watercolor pencils and aren’t all that thrilled with them…or the water soluble pastels he was pushing. They’re ok, but I couldn’t really get a feel for them. Below is a mixture of the water soluble pastels, plus some oil pastels by the same company. I’m not too thrilled about it, but I guess it’s the purist in me. If I want to draw, I’ll using drawing supplies. If I want to paint, I’ll use painting supplies. I guess I don’t like combining the two into one product.



It just feels so forced in my hands. So I decided to play with some regular chalk pastels again. However…I have a problem. I stick my face too close to the picture, and see everything that’s wrong with it instead of stepping back to see that it has some good qualities. So in a sense, I’ll never really like my own work, because I try too hard to fix the problems that make it look…ok? Does that make sense?

The perfect example can be seen in a painting I did for my dad. Unfortunately, I don’t have a photograph of it to show, but that really wouldn’t help. You simply have to see it in person. I found a picture of the Seawolf submarine my dad was involved in making earlier in his career, and thus I painted it using gouache…an opaque watercolor over a black board. I worked on it for two weeks, keeping up close to it while I tried to get the colors right. I was so sick of it by the time of the first critique, that when our teacher gave us an extra week to fix any problems, I simply left it behind. When we returned for our final critique, he explained how I was the only one who didn’t take my piece and how it sat in his office. He also said that it didn’t need any fixing up, that as loose and incomplete it looked up close didn’t matter when you stepped back; when you step back, it tightens up and makes the picture. To top it off, when I showed it to my dad from across the room, he thought it was a photograph I had cut out of a magazine. I got hounded by a couple of my other teachers for not producing the same quality work after the fact.

So for those who are wondering what to get me as a gift…a really nice gouache set. Not acryla gouache, as I really can’t stand that stuff…as I mentioned before in my post with the train.

That, or firearms replicas. A friend of mine has a project for me, and looking for pictures with the right angle of a gun is really hard to find. And since I don’t really want a gun in my house until I’m in my 50’s and can start on my dream of being ‘that crazy cat lady who smokes a pipe and sits on her porch holding her shotgun to keep the hoodlums off of her lawn’…not to mention the fact that I don’t own a gun license, I figure collecting replicas would be the next best solution to my reference needs.

Oh! But I got off track again! Right, because I was really talking about these drawings below! You know, the ones with the pastel chalk! So…where did these come from…? The cemetery. I live down the street and around a couple corners from one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the country. So when I had a couple of friends come down to visit me, I had to take them there to enjoy Nature’s Cathedral…and naturally take some pictures! Duh! If I have pictures that I take myself, then I can draw it up and sell it myself! Weeeeee!




The café that we normally order breakfast from during the week actually offered to let me put my work up on display…and maybe to sell. They’ve got someone else’s work up at the moment, but she seems to have left town without taking it with her. Either way, it’s a good way to get some exposure. So, I’m working on some pieces to actually hang up. Just need to figure out a way of hanging them without framing them. Framing…get’s really expensive after a while, and since it’s summer I don’t have the extra cash flow to pay for something like that. Plus, I’ll be putting one up in the window at the shop, as I used products that we sell at the shop, and my main goal is to help my boss sell the supplies. I figure if I can help her make some money first, then I’ll have a better chance to make money for myself later down the road.

It’s a karma thing.