Today I sat down with my Ticonderoga #2 pencil in hand and gave my first attempt at drawing my website’s banner picture, and despite my history of artistic ineptitude, I nailed it.
The problem, however, was that I made my magnum opus on a sheet of lined paper. I thought there was no way I was going to create a slam dunk of a stick figure on my first go, but lo and behold, I had, and now my handmade masterpiece was tragically unusable and forever marred by four horizontal blue lines.
33 imperfect circles and weirdly drawn eyes later, I finally recreated those exquisite strokes, and this time around, there were no Blue Meanies to be found. I guess lightning does strike twice.
The resemblance between artwork and artist is uncanny. I, too, have two eyes and a mouth, but more importantly, my portrait possesses the pencil and paper upon which I write. Yes, I may have forgotten the nose, but though my nostrils are absent, my essence is enshrined in this stick figure nonetheless. It’s nothing flashy with a dash of unnecessary exclamation, and that’s me in a nutshell.
This may look like simple stuff, but my ever-constant ability to draw one arm longer than the other was only the start of my troubles in crafting this graphite graphic. Painting apps were partially installed and scanners were both successfully and unsuccessfully used, but in the end I resorted to the questionable image quality of the iPhone camera. Cropping photos of pencil drawings won’t produce the highest of resolutions, but anything looked better than the PDF from that scanner: a gritty, grainy, no-good mistake. In hindsight, a pen would have probably scanned better, but it’s no matter, for through the magic of iPhone filters and clarity edits on the computer, I was able to make my alternative-means masterpiece somewhat presentable.
In a world of prodigy painters and top-notch artists, there’s no way I can use aesthetics to stand out among the myriad of blogs, so hopefully my lack of color or quality catches the attention of one or two someones scrolling through the internet. In the end though, this blog is for fun.
And so it begins…
the life stuff 