Homecoming/Improvement MEMEs

I thought I was a terrible artist, quite honestly.

I mean, I'm not great, but I'm also never really satisfied with what I create, for reasons that I'm always sure are quite obvious. I have a four-year art degree, and I know what it's supposed to look like! That being said . . . it ain't all terrible, if you look at the whole. Usually taking pictures just makes my art look worse, but in this case it forced me to see it from a different perspective: as pictures of progress, showing much more clearly than I suspected where I've been and what I've learned.

I still don't really ever finish my drawings, and most of them are sketches. Most of my finished work is from my unemployment/part-time era (don't move to a tourist town...DON'T. Unless you know people/are really good at networking/don't have mental issues and can get along with the locals and be a functional and necessary member of a team that's likely to retain your employment for more than four months a year/can handle working three or more jobs to pay your bills). Anyway ... the sketches aren't terrible. The longview is more impressive than I had expected. There's a few things here and there that I wish had played with a lot more (a cartoonish style I can't seem to replicate, namely), but I was frustrated, I suppose. I hate it when my art looks immature, and I catch myself using the same lines/techniques over and over again. I suppose I'm impatient as fuck, but I'm 33 and have a four-year degree. ...Dammit, I expect better.

Overall, I've been going over a lot of old work, and finding that there was a time when I had passion. When I got up early to write before work, and took notes while working, and came home and wrote some more. I wrote and sketched in front of the TV and I used my sketchbook to flesh out and play with ideas I came up with while writing. I didn't want to go to work, necessarily, but I didn't mind it either. I had a passion, and when I moved away from tiny-town-USA and found work in the city, formed relationships and developed other obligations ... it slid. I had worked myself in too deep, and had trouble breaking out of it to live my life realistically. It helped my writing, obviously, being part of the real world, but it also damaged it. I chose manufacturing. I chose 40+hrs/wk (about 60-70+ in the months before I left), I chose health benefits and a 401K, and I burned out. Only recently, I've started to remember why I reveled in getting up so damn early; and, faced with getting my energy back, I've started to reabsorb myself into my own universe a bit. It's time to come home.

Doing an "improvement meme" isn't really going to quite cover this artistic journey, so I'm going to do it more "my way" as themed collages. Hopefully, this will be a fun and educational experience for me, and will be fun to look at!