…but, as the truism goes, nobody does anything about it.
This actually has nothing to do with the weather, since I use my monitor as a sun-lamp and try to stay out’ve the light as much as possible. Just remember, it’s not pasty, it’s alabaster. However, today as I was wandering aimlessly around Yerf, I found myself reading a thread about how everything is often same old, same old, and found myself replying that it would be nice if there was a way to offer art challenges or whatever to encourage people to try new things.
Then the nagging little voice in the back of my brain stopped in the middle of a really vile limerick about a turkey baster and said “Hey! You! Quit whining and do something! A number of people actually read your shit, god knows why, so what’re you waiting for?!”
Weeeelll….
Herein lies the question. I know that something like 150+ people are supposedly reading this thing, and many of you are artists and aspiring artists. And also busy as sin, I’m sure. Soooo…would any of y’all be interested in a sort’ve “art challenge” once every week or two? I’m not thinking Deathless Art For The Ages, but just stuff that we wouldn’t ordinarily try–a variety, from exercises like “Do something without using any lines, just blocks of shading,” to “Do a tree sloth however you want, because nobody ever does tree sloths, and it’s time they had their moment in the sun” or “Today’s exercise will be on working with backgrounds” or “Do something Art Nouveau,” although of course, I’ll expand on each one with possible suggestions and so forth, and those are just off the top of my head. I’ll draw whatever it is too, of course–we could link to ‘em here and critique each other’s, or whatever, (at the very least, I’d try to offer some kind of critique on each one myself, given that I’m unlikely to get fifty bizillion responses) and I could post the finals over at my webpage at www.metalandmagic.com, if anyone wants some kind of tenuous web immortality. The point wouldn’t be to make Something Great, neccessarily–scribbled pencil sketches are fine, the result could be totally crappy, and I guarantee some of mine will be, but just to get us trying radically different stuff, because we might learn something that could be useful in other work.
The other alternative is that I could run it as some sort of contest, with…I dunno, prints for prizes or something…but I think it’d be more useful as a casual kinda workshop, and way less likely to get people mad at me.
So hey–if anybody’d be interested, leave a message below, and if I get enough of a response that I don’t think I’ll be wandering around listening to the non-mole crickets chirp, I’ll toss out a general thought. (Resident mole crickets are, of course, welcome to chirp all they like.) It may not get far–I know we’re all busy as sin, so if a leaden silence meets this proposal, we can let it drop into the pond of other Dead Ideas–but hey, at least this way I feel like I’m not just complaining about the weather.
Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.
