So this piece is officially worth $500, and it is also out of my hands for the next year.
I did it on May 24 2012 with ink and watercolor, and of course who is it featuring but Micah, my age-old muse…okay hold on, how old is he actually…OH MY GOD, I’ve actually been drawing him for TEN YEARS, according to this page (it was supposed to be a popup but I have no idea where the popup link is anymore). I mean that makes sense, I started all this when I was twelve…it’s hard to believe that I’m 22, and that I’ve been at this for at least 10 years now. I spent so long keeping track of the time and all of a sudden it’s snuck up on me.
During this time, especially during the last few years, my art style has significantly developed into taking dynamic advantage of traditional media. I also got better at not throwing out “errors.” This is strictly a result of formal art training where I was told not to erase, or to draw over old images. So in this piece I was using watercolor pencils trying to color his hair brown. It looked like poop. To an extent, if you put water over watercolor pigment you can lift it off. I tried desperately to lift the poop color, so aggressively that I actually ripped through the very robust watercolor paper. I stared at it for a moment, took a picture, and tweeted about having ruined it by ripping through. But then I kind of…kept working with it. And by that point, screwing up so severely made the thought of anything else happen seem mild. So that was probably why I, with a wild grin, started drawing out huge blue ink lines with the dropper of my inkwell.
I was pretty new to watercolors, having just gotten my first real set of pigments only a few weeks before after I won Best in Show with Brainstorm. That’s why there are places which are very washy and places like the stars in the background which are such thick dots of paint that there is texture. I was messing around with what exactly I could do with this material.
And all of a sudden (almost two weeks after the presentation of the award) it just blew my mind that someone would have hand-picked my artwork, a piece I submitted on a limb to the senior show, and loved it like I did. Blows my mind.
