To Create

There is a yet-unsatisfied creative bone within me.

I have visions of sculpture, carving away plaster or stone to reveal the thing within. Of dragons made from concrete or metal. Colored pencil sketches on 3×3 foot Crescent board. Things that I did to pass classes in college now appeal to some deeply suppressed part of me.

In ART 113, Color, one of our projects was to use process-printing color markers (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black) to create a full-color image using a pointillist technique. I had a snapshot of myself donning my Unicorn visor which I reproduced at a huge scale. In truth, I only completed about four square feet of the project, but the result – even as a partial result, with colors laid up in variable depths – was impressive.

I also enjoyed rendering neon on a black artboard. Finding a technique to “draw” neon was a fun experiment.

This week, I went by the craft stores. I picked up an eraser pack (kneaded, rubber, and vinyl erasers), but neither store carried Prismacolor markers in process colors. Later, when I checked online, I discovered that Prismacolor no longer produced process color markers.

I spent several hours surfing my college website, ultimately calling the art building and asking to speak with one of the TA’s teaching the color classes. I left a message, requesting they call me back. No such luck. If anyone has any suggestions for high-quality art markers in process colors, please let me know.

It was interesting surfing through the website for the art and design departments, bringing back a different set of memories than my visit with Irma on campus this summer.

I am definitely far removed from the creative course of my life at that time. While computers do some things very well, they seem to steal my soul in one way or another. I miss the touch of pencil to paper, the smell and grit of hand creation. I also miss the scale: being able to move my arm or whole body as I make a mark on some canvas, watching something larger than myself take form.

I must draw.