It was kind of scary, but pretty cool too.

My friend Darrel has been a bit of an encouragement with my art for some time. He’s a lot more steeped in creative efforts than I have been, at least as far as his length of involvement. He’s one of those people who identified with his creative side pretty early on, and put himself right in the middle of it and never really thought of it any other way. Me, I was more the type who thought, “It’s fun and all, but I’m not really that good, and that’s not really stuff you do when you have a ‘real’ life.” I changed my mind recently, as you may have guessed from hanging out here, and I’ve started meeting people like Darrel.

For a while he has told me that we should hang out and I can check out some of his work and this massive collection of art magazines that he owns. Today I agreed to go over there, and I brought some of my supplies as he indicated that we might goof around with drawing some stuff. Once I got over there he says, “Oh, and Steve’s coming over also.” Steve is an artist friend of his that I’ve met a couple of times before. Okay, something felt like it was going to happen, but I didn’t know what.

Once Steve gets over there I’m looking at magazines, and those guys start getting out a bunch of paper and talking about something their apparently working on, and then Darrell looks over at me and says, “Okay, so the deal is we’re going to trade off and we’re each going to draw on these and kind of collaborate.”

I laughed a little nervously. “I can’t draw,” I said.
“What do you mean you can’t draw?”
“I haven’t drawn anything since high school.”
“You can do this stuff.”
“Um, okay.”

And so we did. Some hours later I was informed that we were going to color them as well.
“With what?” I asked.
“You brought your stuff! Pencils,” Darrel said.
“Um, okay.”

I went home at about 11pm. I’d been working on art with these guys for about six or seven hours all told. It was pretty wild, spending all that time just drawing and whatnot. At one point one of Darrel’s friends called, and he said, “Oh, we’re just hanging out here, making art.”

Really? That’s what we’re doing? Yeah. Yeah, I guess that *is* what we’re doing. Making art, not just screwing around, we’re making art. Woah. That’s kind of cool.

Darrel had me take one of the drawings home to work on by myself, so we’ll see how that goes. I think those guys are okay with what I was doing, but it was kind of scary trying to fit in and not worry about doing something really stupid. I’m pretty glad they asked me to work with them. This is the first time I’ve collaborated like that. It was nice to be included. Besides, I desperately needed the creative time. I’ve missed doing stuff with my hands. I love creating stuff that way.

That reminds me, Steve, who had seen one of my rolling ball sculptures, asked what I’d been doing with them lately. “I haven’t made any. Nothing. I’ve been too busy.”
“That’s not good at all,” he said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it sucks,” I said.
Damn, I miss that.