So here it is, the 20th of November already. Isn’t it funny how time seems to pass more quickly the older one gets?
I missed blogging last week. That is, I didn’t write anything, mostly because I wanted to write something profound and impactive regarding current events and the unfortunate plight of our national state of media misinformation. I decided it would be too much like shouting from a soapbox and put a post out on Facebook instead.
One of the best things about Facebook is that you can share almost anything and people won’t remember it a week later.
Switching topics, I’ve been delving deep into digital art lately and thought I’d share some interesting treasures. But before I get to them I want to share some backstory. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an art teacher. I think I really wanted to be an artist and a teacher, but at the time it somehow came across as “art teacher”. I know this partly because I remember my fondness for art and also because my Nana kept a memory book for me. A “School Years” book.
At the end of each school year, she’d glue or tape my school picture on the appropriate page in the book. Then she asked me who my friends were, what I wanted to be when I grew up, and sometimes recorded my weight and height. When I was old enough, she gave me the book to finish for myself. It is now tattered and torn, but I’ve recently scanned each page so that it is stored electronically. It was fun to revisit old memories but I’d forgotten some of the details.
Years K through 4 record my future ambitions as wanting to be an “artist/teacher”. From that I went to “scientist” for a couple of years, then “lawyer”, “astronaut”, and “engineer”. The law profession occurred to me in junior high; those years are typical of being mixed up and confused about everything so it’s no wonder that I put down something totally out of whack with my personality. But I’ve spent most of my life circulating around the remaining triage of art, science, and engineering.
On the surface, these three different career paths require different sets of skills. As a matter of fact, during my first year of college I attended an orientation during which we were encouraged to choose one interest over another in order to define our future choice of degree. But I’ve discovered, to my delight, that all three are helpful (if not necessary) in digital art.
I think that if you combine the aptitudes for creativity and imagination (required for art), with some technical precision and logic (from engineering), and the ability to use curiosity and exploration to build on theory (from science), all in one person, chances are you’ll have someone who is going to love digital art.
