"Watching the painter paint, it's the best mistake he could make"

Today I impulsively bought a sketchbook, some acrylic paints, paintbrushes, a fancy schmancy pencil and white rubber eraser. Much to my pleasure, the store was having a 20%-off sale, and I got all this stuff for $21.

And I now just drew this duck.

I went into that art store for two reasons: 1) I've been listening to Kate Bush's "Aerial" a lot--the concept behind the album is that it takes over the place of the day, from dawn to dusk to midnight to the sun rise and repeat, which also neatly works as a meditation on the artistic process of creation (read an interesting transcribed article summarizing Bush's canon here). Reason number 2 is I figure that if I'm going to be organizing (and possibly teaching) art classes to kiddies, I might as well brush up on my old art "skills." I also drew one atrocious comic page for a short story I've been working on. I'm sort of shocked at how much fun it is. It's like I'm using a part of my brain that's been left to get neglected and dusty for years. I guess at some point in high school or something I gave up on art because I felt I wasn't talented or good enough. Well, poo poo on that, you don't have to be good or particularly talented to draw stupid ducks, 's long as you have fun, methinks. All of the time, we gotta be changing.