Snow and Ice
Pieces of My Mind #1
Growing up, winter meant one thing—school breaks thanks to the glorious, fluffy white stuff. Sometimes we’d be out for weeks at a time, left to our own devices. Each morning I woke early to dial a number to see if I get another day at home. Calls were more often met with the beep of a busy line, but eventually a scratchy recording would play, “Watauga County Schools are closed for teachers and students. It is an optio…”. *click!* I never listened to the whole thing. All I needed to hear was that magical word—closed.
Lots has changed since then. Even if snow is a foot deep, kids must endure remote learning. Snow days are a thing of the past. And so is snow, it seems. The hills of snow lining either side of the road for weeks at a time when I was a child are long gone. If it snows, it’s only a few flakes that disappear by afternoon. But what we lost in snow accumulation we gained in plummeting mercury.
This week has been absolutely miserable with more miserable forecasted. I don’t remember the last time the temperature rose above freezing. It seems to have settled around 10-15F with no plans of heading north anytime soon. I don’t mind the cold, but this is too much.
In between bundling up and carefully navigating frozen parking lots while the hateful wind tries to undo everything, I’ve made tiny steps forward in my work. I say tiny only because there’s not much to show for the effort put forth, but sometimes that’s how it goes. Some of the most important steps simply take time.
Slowing down also means that I’m entering the detail stages of my work which is followed by the finished stage!
If you caught my last post, The Year of the Bear, you know I have a comic strip coming out any day now. The first story arc is largely complete, but I’m still messing with character design. My art style is very realistic which won’t work for the speed at which comics come out. I’ve had to simplify, simplify again, and again to develop characters that are full of expression yet quickly reproducible. Simple is much harder than it looks. Once I settle on a design, I make a character sheet that shows colors used, the character in various perspectives, and so on. I plan to release these in some form or another down the road a bit.
Sculpting has, unfortunately, not taken place this week. I chose to move my sculpting desk to a better location and simply haven’t had the time to break it in. I’ve got to get back to it. Next week…
I started a small 5x7” oil painting a few days ago. It came from an idea I had while sketching around a scrap piece of paper. I transferred the sketch to a 5x7” hardboard and went right to work blocking in color. It sat in the drying rack for a day or two before I picked it back up. Today, I painted in a nice lush tree canopy. I could mix paint all day, especially green. Leafy green stuff is so much fun and challenging to paint due to the subtle color shifts. It was a big win, for sure, and really turned my spirits around after an otherwise pretty down week.
I’m still not comfortable showing works in progress. That’ll change once I have a gallery of finished work to show off. It’s a lack of confidence, I’m not ashamed to admit. Thankfully, this painting is going quickly so I can do a write up soon with photos showing each stage, ending in a (hopefully) beautiful, finished painting.
I connected a domain to this website. You can now find this page at www.VREart.com After discussing with my wife, we felt it was best to make this the main landing page for my work. I also added an Etsy shop link to the navigation bar at the top of the page. This is a new shop with only a few sales on it so far, but I’ve received positive 5 star ratings across the board! Currently, there are only photography prints available to purchase, but that will change over the coming weeks as new artwork is added.
One more note: please check your spam or promotional folders to make sure these newsletters aren’t landing there. If you find them, please mark it as “not spam”, or however your email program words it. Adding the email address to your contacts may help as well. There’s not much I can do on my end to prevent it from happening, so I appreciate your help. You’re not going to want to miss future mailings!
I’m about to bundle up (Boo!), collect the wife (Yay!), and take home some pizza (Yum!).
Until next time!
-Victor