as an artist, my fingers will just get hella buff while the rest of me slowly becomes part of the couch
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chimichonga3-deactivated2018010 asked:
Hi i'm in high school and i'm just thinking about being in your position right now and it just seems like something seemingly impossible to achieve. Personally i'm just curious on how it happened, basically when did it all start and how did you develop the skills you have today?
mermapede-deactivated20180724 answered:
TLDR; I had, like, no friends. Or at least none that demanded my presence frequently.
I started drawing when my brother took violin lessons from a woman who wanted absolute silence when she taught. I was about three at the time. I wasn’t aloud to sneeze or talk to my mother, so my mom gave me paper to whisper stories into her ear to write down and then I’d draw pictures to go with them and/or some miscellaneous Powerpuff Girls and Sailor Moon illustrations on the side.
But that’s not the important part.
There is something beautiful about being stuck in your bedroom for almost your entire life. Before I go on I should probably clarify something: I use the word ‘beautiful’ to describe my affections for gnarly spiders, eldrich deep sea creatures, and boys—things that can appear terrifying and even malicious at times from the surface but upon further inspection are intricate tapestries of being that only resulted in such a striking first impression after decades of manifestation and development. Something that upon deeper understanding puts in you a position of peace and satisfaction.
The beauty of being stuck in my bedroom for a majority of my life was that I always had to find something to do and something to love. Not someone, but something. Making a regular connection with people was a difficult due to my lack of public appearances so I relied on the excitement of particular activities and things to keep me going. Also, because my connections often resulted only in weak acquaintances, people were not a very reliable constant source of contentment. I learned to see my solitude as space instead of an empty void and developed a sense of creativity and individuality in it. My social life almost exclusively existed during school hours near the end of middle school and high school and that was just enough to keep me from feeling lonely and just enough to pin down a few solid friends and lots of acquaintances that I was always happy to be around. But because of the lack of people to really “distract” me from my passions, my drive to follow ambitions and dreams became quite strong and manageable.
As you can imagine, I read a lot of Emmerson to sweeten my view of such solitude. I also drew a lot of pictures and wrote a lot of terrible poems and stories to push out the loneliness that crept in. However, my reasons for drawing became something else entirely with high school. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that was full of opportunities. If there was something I really wanted to do, I learned that with some persistence, I could find people to help me do it. I didn’t have much of an artist community to inspire me and thrill me with their own work, but I was also lucky enough to go to a school where all the teachers were enablers to some kind of passion, whether it was biking, writing grand epic poems on a regular basis, or starting a music gig. People knew of my interests in illustration and started asking me to make posters for the music department and the theater department. I developed a sense of graphic design here. This grew to me being asked to do posters, advertisement packages, and logos for smaller corporations, bands, not-for-profit organizations, and other performance-type productions in other states on occasion. Thus, graphic design became my way of building a social life in a very obscure way, creatively connecting and collaborating with people, and giving myself little thrills to live for.
Everyone says that these things get your name out. I’m still not entirely sure if that’s true at all, but it certainly helped to build a nice portfolio in the end. The most important thing about pursuing a a career is anything is finding connections. What people often forget is that finding connections means talking to people, not just doing things for other people, because you can’t rely on your clients to tell other people how great you were to work with just because you made something cool for them.
In addition to all of this, I had little professional training. I learned to fall in love my work but I had little technical skill. Thus, to sharpen my skills I went to Gage Academy to study Fine Arts and RISD’s pre-college program to study as a Graphic Design major for a summer. These two things alone skyrocketed my skill level, so I’d highly recommend things like this. I wish I had done it more, but I guess that’s why I’m going to RISD for college.
But I will end this with a little thing that one of my favorite artists, Sam Spratt, wrote, which kept me going:
“You’re an artist and you feel boxed in?
Good.
You can do a lot with a box, don’t throw it away just yet.”
Great advice
imaginations-fly
