Post by Marnie Sullivan on May 16, 2014 3:16:53 GMT -5
Marnie had always considered art class to be a fairly harmless elective. She figured this in both a literal sense - paintbrushes and clay were significantly less dangerous than the woodsaws and stray nails of shop class - and in the academic sense - art was subjective, so the only way to fail was to not turn anything in, right? It also felt safer than creative writing; when she'd taken such a class the previous year, it seemed like every assignment required some brilliant and deeply personal meaning. In visual art, that was always an option, but sometimes she just wanted to make something pretty.
That was the goal, anyway. Maybe once Marnie learned how to make pretty thigs she could move on to making meaningful things, but this first step was already proving to be a challenge.
Inspired by the temporary tattoo an ink-manipulating classmate had decorated her arm with, Marnie was attempting to paint a flower. What kind, she didn't know - she just wanted to recreate the large petals and graceful edges of he image without copying it completely. So far all she'd managed to produce was a flower-shaped mess with blobby petals. Most of the watercolor was a lovely cornflower blue she quite liked, but when she attempted to speckle the petals with yellow, the colors ran together without even being consistently wrong enough to appear intentional.
Marnie paused in her work to swish her paintbrush around in her cup of murky rinse water and frowned at the childish attempt in front of her. In the right hands it might have been salvageable, but clearly those hands were not hers.
That was the goal, anyway. Maybe once Marnie learned how to make pretty thigs she could move on to making meaningful things, but this first step was already proving to be a challenge.
Inspired by the temporary tattoo an ink-manipulating classmate had decorated her arm with, Marnie was attempting to paint a flower. What kind, she didn't know - she just wanted to recreate the large petals and graceful edges of he image without copying it completely. So far all she'd managed to produce was a flower-shaped mess with blobby petals. Most of the watercolor was a lovely cornflower blue she quite liked, but when she attempted to speckle the petals with yellow, the colors ran together without even being consistently wrong enough to appear intentional.
Marnie paused in her work to swish her paintbrush around in her cup of murky rinse water and frowned at the childish attempt in front of her. In the right hands it might have been salvageable, but clearly those hands were not hers.
