I love color, lots and lots of color. I don’t think you’d ever know that by looking at me personally. I seem to kind of confine it to doing art work, at least for the time being. When I have the opportunity to exploit it, I do. Here’s a little something I’ve started working on that shows my tendencies to occasionally indulge in mucho color usage.

Fun stuff, huh? I started on this maybe a week or so ago. I started small – this is a little sheet of 5″x3″ notepad paper – because I just knew I’d wind up doing something rather ridiculously detailed, and if I didn’t do it small it would take an interminable amount of time to finish. Well, that and that fact that I’d seen someone else’s work like this, and his stuff was so awesome that doing anything larger than this seemed kind of impossible. What can I say, I guess sometimes it’s best to start small. It worked for the sculpture stuff, didn’t it?

I had some help on this. The guy, Darryl, whose work I’d seen, really is talented. So much so that I looked at his work and went, “Woah. Awesome! No way I can do that.” I couldn’t stop talking about it, though, and every time I saw Darryl I mentioned it to him. He responded by showing up a few times with examples of his work for me to see, and one time he added. “I have a few of the color pencils I used, some extras. I’ll bring them out some time.” A few weeks later he shows up with not five or six pencils like I’d assumed, but over fifteen! Tons of colors! I was very grateful. I thanked him profusely, took them home, and immediately almost immediately became afraid of them and put them in my drawer.

Darryl, the next several times I saw him, asked if I’d been working with my new pencils. For a while I told him I was really busy, which was partly true (see rolling ball sculpture posts), but after several more weeks I finally just said, “Man, you’re stuff is so cool I’m just afraid that mine is going to suck.” The next time I saw him he handed me a drawing of his and said, “Here. This is for inspiration.”

That pretty much did it. I put the drawing on my desk where I could see it every morning when I wrote. That action kept drawing on my mind and made me realize I needed to get the pencils out where I could USE them, so I got them out of the drawer. Not long after that I looked at one of the many note pads scattered about my house and said, “Okay, I can do this. I can do this if I start really small.”

Most of the work on the drawing has been done with me standing at my kitchen stove, pencils scattered all over the place. It’s nothing groundbreaking, no masterwork of hue and design and concept, but it is pretty fun, and what I learned in the Artist’s Way is that I need to pursue creative activities that make me feel good, no matter what the actual output is like. This may pass quickly, or morph into yet one more thing that sucks up my free time. Whatever the result, I need to follow my gut, which right now basically says, “Play around with squiggly lines and a bunch of different colors. You need to do that.”