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Essay Accompanying A Design Project
by Senior Art Student Correspondent Jackson "Shadowfax" Brody The student hunched over the infernal 14x14 illustration board, dying a little inside as he realized all he had left to paint. Those large white unpainted spaces loomed before him, mocking him in their uncompleted state. The student turned his attention to his pathetic palette. Randomly splattered about were tiny mounds of sloppy gray values, growing hard and dry with each passing second. He frantically attempted to keep his paints in a liquid state by liberally applying droplets of water, but his efforts only caused it to thin. What was once a mighty acrylic paint was reduced to a useless, runny mess. " What am I doing wrong?" he demanded of his brain. The brain could not bring itself to respond anymore, for it had already offered all it could to help guide its forlorn host. We knew he had to apply more paint to the palette if he was ever going to cover the seemingly endless plane that lay before him. He reached for his tube of white paint, and squirted a miniscule amount onto the already crowded palette. Despite his efforts to ration his supplies, they still ran low. It was only a matter of time before he would have to brave the cold and travel to the mystical domain called Utrecht ' s to exchange his hard-earned pennies for more tubes of that cursed titanium white. Many thoughts raced across his brow, all fighting for attention. He wanted to give total focus to his brush upon the board, for each wrong stroke he made added multitudes of minutes to an already long undertaking. Each uneven line he painted, each accidental smear, each uneven value jumped up from the board like some sort of acrylic jester. I can do better, he mused silently, but when will these hands grant me the power? The clock continued to creep forward, and his paints continued to turn into tiny mounds of cakey frozen color. How could he give his sketches proper dimension when so many demons danced on the surface of his soul? His desire to do a sublime job was pure, even though his craft fell far beneath the class standard. He yearned to paint with the same patience and skill as those around him. He wanted to see the light his design course offered, but some insidious invisible force kept his artistic eyelids from opening. His cries for help were occasionally answered, but he could sense his master and his peers growing tired of constantly running to his aid. He loathed being in such a low state, but did not know where else to turn when his painting anxieties gained dominance of his consciousness. Outside his window, the sounds of birds chirping and careless youths playing stickball in the alley taunted him. He solemnly contemplated when he would again be able to rejoin his fellow man in sport and merriment, for it seemed the design project would never be complete no matter how much time he sacrificed to the altar of gray scales and transparency. He then realized he must be hallucinating, for birds do not chirp in the dead of winter and that he had never seen children playing stickball on this barren college campus. Shucking aside these delusions, he bravely pushed on knowing he painted because he wanted the education promised him. He painted because he had to find his way in this world. He painted because he cared. Somewhere far away, a newborn infant smiled for the first time
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