billtrost.com

yes. i’m still alive. and there is another part to this story…

so, now that you are good and respectful of the paper as it is, the next part of learning watercolors (and life) is to load up a full brush of paint and just fling it at that blank paper, letting the drops and spatters fall where they may. i know at first this seems to contradict the previous lesson, and it does to some degree, but what it also does is free you from preconceptions. it presents you with a new and random problem that all the forethought in the world can not prepare you for. it requires you to solve a slightly different problem every time. it injects a sense of life into your work and requires you to be loose and open in how you go about executing your ideas. over time, you learn to develop new techniques to work around the various incarnations of this initial randomness and all the other “happy accidents” you encounter along the way… you learn to view them as opportunities to flex your skill and show off! and your work gets better and better and begins to take on a sense of effortlessness rather than labor. it also helps you learn to know when it is best to just suck it up, eat the 10 bucks, and start fresh.

-the end-

Doug’s watercolor class changed my life and i think made me a better game designer.

here are some of the particulars of the class:

1. no pencil sharpeners. use a razor-blade or x-acto knife to carve a point. (carried over from his drawing class)
2. you must work on d’arches 300lb cold press watercolor paper.
3. you must hand stretch your paper before painting.

d’arches 300lb cold press watercolor paper, at that time, cost around $10 a sheet. ten dollars a sheet! to a starving artist at a community college this was a ton of money. hell, it still sounds expensive to me. but that cost was one of the points of the lesson…

hand stretching paper involves taking your $10 piece of paper and running it under a faucet until it is totally soaked. you then tape your paper to a large, flat work-surface… (cardboard, tabletop… etc.) tape down one edge, then another, pulling the wet $10 paper as hard as you dare as you go, until the whole wet, stinky, $10, thing is as flat as it can be.

you get to know this paper. you know how it feels. you know how it smells. you see how it reacts to water. you learn its tensile strength. how it buckles and shrinks as it dries…

once we all had that done, the film began. Doug had a film on how d’arches 300lb $10 cold-press paper was made. it was kinda long for a film about people making paper by hand… but the point came across loud and clear so i understood it when he actually said it.

it was something like this: “this paper is already a work of art. as it is. blank. before you ever put a mark on it. so, when you do start to put marks on it, do what you can to make sure they are good marks.”

this is only ½ the lesson though… and if i only got this half i would imagine i would still be a pretty neurotic artist… but i feel it was important to learn that decisions i make as an artist have weight and cost and can potentially “spoil” something that was already pretty dang good to begin with. it was good enough to cost $10 before i ever touched it…

when i was an art student at palomar college, my first drawing class was with Doug Durrant. Doug is an easy going art professor with a funky cowboy style who is full of funny stories and sage advice. at the time, i really had no idea the impact he and his class would have on my entire life, let alone my art. i just knew i liked Doug and how encouraging and supportive he was of whatever aspect of art you were into. it was very refreshing. in my experience, most art professors have very rigid ideas about what is art and what isn’t. Doug has none of that. at the time, i was very much into comic books and professional wrestling as subject matter for my art. so of course, each class, Doug would have some new story to tell me from the worlds of big time wrasslin’ or funny books. it was the awesome. i wasn’t special. he did this for all his students.

Doug also had been at palomar when phil tippett was a student there. to the star wars nerd that i am/was, this was like being taught by someone who taught god how to build a tauntaun.

i took many more classes from Doug during my time at palomar.

i really should go visit Doug’s class this summer…

in the next part, i’ll actually start to get to the point of all this.