Art?

Wordle 569 4/6

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Yesterday breakfast at home was leisurely and fancy: scrambled eggs and home fries. The kid came home around 10:30. A friend of hers came over shortly after that. Meanwhile I inked the self-portrait. Coincidentally, T. and I also cleaned out some old boxes/portfolios of art. It started with the kid's old stuff. We want to keep lots of her art, but that doesn't mean every single school worksheet or coloring book page. After that we moved on to my old stuff. My parents had dropped off a portfolio with ~50 pieces from my high school years that they didn't want to keep. I identified about 5 I liked enough to hold on to and recycled the rest. It was a tiny bit hard, but realistically, I'm never going to do anything with them.

In the afternoon we went to a Scout event at the Natural History Museum's dinosaur exhibit. T. dropped off me, the kid, and the kid's friend from across the street. There was a quick intro beforehand with worksheets for the Scouts and meeting afterwards discussing what they had found, but it was mostly each parent guiding their respective kid, or kids in my case, through the exhibit. 

In the evening, T. and the kid played their respective games on their devices while I finished coloring the self-portrait, using a mix of crayons and pastels, and made dinner: pork chops, couscous, and green beans. Over dinner we video-chatted with my parents.

Right before bed the kid and I tried playing Sleeping Queens 2, a Christmas present the kid got, but it's quite a bit more complicated than the previous version of the game and it was the last minute anyway. 

Art.

I found myself more disappointed with the portrait as it got closer to done. It was basically comic-book-style art, pencils followed by inks followed by simple colors. It's one thing to look at a pencil sketch and think, well, that arm looks a little lumpy or is my head really that wide? It's another thing to see a pen stroke in the middle of nowhere or think I must have been on drugs to use those colors. I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone outside the house seeing this.

Part of the problem is the materials. Pencil is almost impossible to screw up, but even there I found myself wishing I had a better eraser. After that it got harder. We have about a hundred pens in the house but most of them are ballpoint pens, a lot of them are mostly dried out, and a lot of them aren't plain black. I found one fine point Sharpie and used it even though it was partially dried out too. Colors were worse. We have literally hundreds of crayons in this house and a lot of them are smudged browns. I got out one of the kid's fancier sets of art supplies but found any one type of coloring implement would be inadequate for the skin tones and shades of grays and browns in my clothes and the furniture.

Part of the problem was being out of practice. Like I said, it's been 20 years. I thought about adding ink hatch marks after I started coloring. And of course, part of the problem isn't a problem at all, just my own perfectionism and other neuroses. 

Part of the reason I didn't stick with art all those years ago was I was too self-critical to enjoy it. But despite all this I don't actually mind the problems with the picture too much. After all, the kid is happy with it and that's what matters. Maybe I've grown out of it and should start sketching now and then?