Art stuff: Oh, how I one time hated you so.

Two scans of a watercolour piece from my “I wanna be an artist” days below the cut.

I’ve been sorting out my art stuff by scanning some interesting ones and then discard them along with the embarrassingly bad pieces. I really don’t have the room for them now. My scanner is quite small, so I could only scan the entire by halving this one.

Top half

This gave me so many headaches. I think this is actually, roughly, the fourteenth attempt. I like heavy line art and sketch-like drawings, which is why I had problems creating something like this. It demanded a light hand and a lot of patience, which I didn’t quite have.

And it’s in watercolour! You know how much hassle it gave me? Let’s put this way: it’s almost like dating a vain skirt-chaser with ADD and a bad case of crabs.

Bottom half

(Almost all old art pieces are damaged, one way or another, because of the constant travelling that involved a lot of rough storage handling, so excuse that tear in bottom half.)

Those shoes? WTF, Maili?

It’s not one of my pleasing efforts because it doesn’t look as antiquated as I wanted. And the hairline looks freaky.  More I look at it, more mistakes I see, which irritates me enough to look at it more. Vicious circle. I had problems with her hands (which is my weakest area and strangely enough, the nose is the second weakest). Had a lot of help with this piece, though. (Thanks, Lawrence!)

This tendency of getting irritated with my efforts was the reason why I decided to go down the production route instead of the art route.  I sometimes wondered if there were a time machine, could I succeed in telling myself to  get over it and continue with the ‘I’m not one of those poncy elite educated Artists! I’m a self-taught doodler and proud of it!” road (yeah, I wasn’t exactly bright back then)?

If I succeeded, what would it be like? A failed and completely neurotic artist, or art teacher at a primary school? Or would it be just a prolonged moment of time before falling into the production route anyway? Probably not because the production route was also accidental (got in via a flatmate’s boyfriend’s former classmate’s porno art house film).

Actually, come to think of it, History & Politics were also accidental. I was late with submission of the ULCAS form, so I took what I thought looked interesting: Graphic Design. Hated it within two weeks as it was typography-oriented (read: measurements). I switched to the one that had an available place, which was History & Politics, and spent next three years hanging out in Art dept when I wasn’t dragged back by history or politics lecturers, or kicked out by art lecturers. I was probably the worst student in the uni’s 100-or-so-year history.

Anyroad, now that it’s scanned it’s going into the bin. Only pieces I’m keeping are children-type line art and paintings. I would like to frame and put them up in the mites’ bedrooms at a new house (if that day ever arrived). My favourite is a girl flying to the moon. Totally whimsical and quite a poor effort, but I love it because for some reason, it makes me smile. Will have to scan it for this blog.

Will asked some time ago if I would consider painting murals in mites’ bedrooms. I refused. Could you image seeing and living with the same old image for months if not years? At least with framed pictures, you can change them for something else. With a mural, you can’t. It’ll remain there until you paint it over. No. No murals, but Will seems to be hooked on the idea. He said if I won’t do it, he’ll hire a professional muralist.

Heh. Uh, no. I’ll kill the muralist and hide his or her body in the garden before I’d let a hair of their paintbrush would touch any of our walls.