The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Arts & Entertainment => Topic started by: linnea on December 02, 2007, 07:38:43 pm
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Well, one of my recent resolutions has been to start drawing and doing printmaking again. In grad school, I had all my imagination crushed out of me and dropped out. I got a book called "Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain" at the bookstore the other day as a treat to myself.
The reason why I had to start this thread... My cats saw me in the mirror. I propped up a mirror on my office chair and sat on the sofa to draw myself. Milan stood up like a little meerkat or prairie dog and STARED at me in the mirror, his tail bushing up. I busted up laughing. It totally confused his wee kittybrain. "OMG... There is another momma in there! What the hell?" and then he tried to see what was behind the mirror.
It cracked me up when Lennybruce did the EXACT SAME THING ten minutes later. I think it's hilarious when their tails bush up, they look like bottle brushes. Anyway, the cats hop up on my bathroom vanity quite often and look at me in the mirror, and it doesn't faze them in the least. When I pick Lenny up for cuddles, I will often stand in front of the mirror so I can look at how cute he is. I never expected them to freak out over a mirror on a chair.
Anyway, I'm working through the exercises and hopefully I can find studio space or maybe take another printmaking class to get back into it, since I don't have any printmaking equipment. Who knows, maybe i'll find another medium that I like even better!
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oh man, mirror-self-recognition gives me a major hard-on for psychology.
drawing is something that... I don't know about. When I was a kid, I got to a certain point where I decided that it was just something that I was bad at, and that taking art classes was just something I had to do. I didn't take art throughout middle school, except for 8th grade. By that point my art was even worse relative to everyone else's, but I learned a little bit. At this point I think I just have to accept that drawing, like writing songs and writing stories, is just something I have to appreciate other people doing.
I am taking fiction writing next semester, though. I used to really like writing when I was a kid. Actually, no, I used to concoct incredibly elaborate fantasies of whole lives of characters, and think about them for hours before I fell asleep, or on bus rides. I don't remember ever writing any of them down. They were all crazy super-hero-sci-fi things where I stole a lot of ideas from books I had read recently. I feel like this was one of the incredibly few things I have done regularly in my life that no one knew about... normally I feel the need to tell everyone every little stupid detail of my life. It is weird to think that I have not thought about any of this stuff in years and years. Of course, eventually these stories devolved into weird sexual stuff which is really horrifying in retrospect. I think a developmental psychologist would have a great day if I wrote out some of the bizarre situations I came up with.
But yeah, drawing is something I have never really applied myself to. A large part of this is probably that I have always had a problem, especially when I was a kid, where there were certain things which came really easily to me... and so anything which didn't became something which I didn't like, and thought I was bad at.
The drawing, though, I actually was really bad at. That is one of the things they noticed which led to being diagnosed with hell of attention issues.
Linnea, I am glad you are drawing again. Don't let those mean grad-school people take something you like doing away from you.
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I just find it really interesting in general that some activity can be a huge part of your life for a long time, and then you can just stop doing it without missing it. I have noticed this a lot with musicians, but that is just the aspect of the arts I know the most about.
My good friend's brother, for example, hadn't played drums in something like 5 years, when suddenly he woke up in the middle of the night with a beat in his head. that day, he went out and bought a drum set, which he definitely couldn't afford, because he knew that beat wouldn't leave until he could play it out. So, now he's back to playing drums almost every day, after all those years of never even thinking about it.
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I'm at constant war with my "wanting to draw" and my "looking at my drawings and feeling like a goddamned child". It is a thing in my life.
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Okay, Gen-X, help me out.
In my childhood, there was a show about drawing for kids on PBS. It was kinda science-fictiony, and taught about things like shading, and depth, and all of that. I believe it was a two word title, with the second word being "City." I used to love that goddamned show, and actually drew unbadly when I was between 8 and 10 as a result.
Now? Stick figures that I draw look funny.
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Okay, Gen-X, help me out.
In my childhood, there was a show about drawing for kids on PBS. It was kinda science-fictiony, and taught about things like shading, and depth, and all of that. I believe it was a two word title, with the second word being "City." I used to love that goddamned show, and actually drew unbadly when I was between 8 and 10 as a result.
Now? Stick figures that I draw look funny.
Did it end with the main guy adding to a huge mural-sized drawing? It was kind of like a city made up of tubes and caverns and whatnot? Because if so I was just trying to remember that exact same show a couple of weeks ago.
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I liked the old guy on PBS that drew forests.
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he did the same thing for me cooking shows do. Just... so relaxing. People are making crafts, man. They are explaining their crafts in a gentle way which I can understand, and I am safe in the knowledge that I, too, could make a simple stew with Thanksgiving leftovers, and add just the right chopped-up vegetables.
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There's a lot of meat on that bone. Get some potatoes, some broth...baby you got a stew going.
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so good. is so good.
Carl Weathers is kind of soothing in the same way, I guess. But in kind of a way with an edge of discomfort. So... not soothing.
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Did it end with the main guy adding to a huge mural-sized drawing? It was kind of like a city made up of tubes and caverns and whatnot? Because if so I was just trying to remember that exact same show a couple of weeks ago.
HOLY SHIT I forgot all about that but yes, yes, a million times yes. That is, in fact, the show.
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HOLY SHIT I forgot all about that but yes, yes, a million times yes. That is, in fact, the show.
It must be one of the following, all of which had the same host: Mark Kistler's Imagination Station (105 episodes), Mark also hosted The Secret City (65 episodes), The Draw Squad (48 episodes) and The New Secret City (3 episodes). It's not looking like they're on IMDB, plus PBS stations have a habit of running really, really old stuff anyway so production years might not help anyway.
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OMG, Cort doesn't just CortJstr the strip, he CortJstr's the whole world.
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OMG, Cort doesn't just CortJstr the strip, he CortJstr's the whole world.
You're goddamned right he does. Tiny can to both you and Cort.
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It must be one of the following, all of which had the same host: Mark Kistler's Imagination Station (105 episodes), Mark also hosted The Secret City (65 episodes), The Draw Squad (48 episodes) and The New Secret City (3 episodes). It's not looking like they're on IMDB, plus PBS stations have a habit of running really, really old stuff anyway so production years might not help anyway.
THE SECRET CITY FTW. That is exactly it. Wikipedia says Kistler was "Commander Mark" on the show, which I remembered as soon as I read it. Hooray, repressed memory! Tiny cans for Cort every day for as long as I remember to do so. Jesus, man, that's been bothering me for a hot minute.
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Kistler's all over YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Mark+Kistler&search=Search)
I was a huge fan of a Canadian show called Mr. Dressup, similarly Mr. Dressup would break drawing down into simple to understand elements, and I'd take out my paper and draw, but then he'd go on from the basic to just kicking ass, and I'd get so damn frustrated! He was way better than little kid me was! He also dressed up in fabulous costumes out of his "tickle trunk." Such wonderful, creative children's programming.
I'm pretty good at drawing, painting, sculpting, etc. I was just always good at that sort of stuff. My art teacher in highschool used to sneak me extra supplies to take home and use on my own. I still have the acrylic paint set and chalk pastels he gave me. They're quality items - they'd cost me over $50 to replace. I took some theatre design classes in university too, and I still have some of my projects. It's been a while since I've taken that stuff out.
Hey remember when Teatime wanted us to draw wordless strips and then other people would write in the words? I drew a strip, emailed it to him, then he disappeared. Anyone want me to email them the drawing I made, and you can add text? I'm very low-tech, so I drew it by hand then scanned it. I could send it to several people and they could each do different text based on it - that might be interesting.
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I was a huge fan of a Canadian show called Mr. Dressup, similarly Mr. Dressup would break drawing down into simple to understand elements, and I'd take out my paper and draw, but then he'd go on from the basic to just kicking ass, and I'd get so damn frustrated!
My guitar teacher used to do the same thing. It was always frustrating, but kind of cool to listen to anyway. He was probably not a great teacher.
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Kistler once exploited Gabe from Penny Arcade. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2005/06/17) (scroll down)
I used to watch that show a lot too. I noticed that he always put a line inside open doorways "to make it look like a hallway behind there." I remember thinking, at the time, that I didn't know of any houses that had front doors that opened onto a hallway.
Weird.