Elevate Your Graphic Design
Of the sketches I’ve shared for #TBT this one is more recent than high school. From the location in my sketch book (and the kitchen design idea showing thru on the other side of the page), I’m going to guess it should be dated sometime around 2002. Smokey was my first dog and it left a big hole in my heart when he passed on.
On this day set aside for gratitude, I’m thankful for the special people and pets who have touched my life.
I can’t remember the first year we attended ROTR. I do remember it only cost canned goods to get in. I’ll have to look back through my festival ephemera—programs, photos, posters or ticket stubs to see if I left more of a trail.
Saturday, August 8, 2015 :
Here’s another sketch from high school. This one’s of my friends Liz (left), Dayna (center), and myself (right). I’m not sure why I’ve got us holding skateboards. We weren’t skaters, although we did run with the ‘alternative’ crowd, the freaks and geeks who didn’t fit in anywhere else. I don’t remember why we were wearing Earth Ninja t’s either, probably that we felt we could take on and protect the world. Today, when I volunteer with Audubon Rockies at the Four Mile Ranch we talk to the students about being Earth Ninjas, leaving behind little to no trace of our presence on the planet.
“…But I turned sulky and wouldn’t. (Yes, sulkiness, that’s the right word for it!) I sat in my room like a spider. You’ve been in my den, you’ve seen it.… And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp the soul and the mind? Ah, how I hated that garret! And yet I wouldn’t go out of it! I wouldn’t on purpose! I didn’t go out for days together, and I wouldn’t work, I wouldn’t even eat, I just lay there doing nothing. If Nastasya brought me anything, I ate it, if she didn’t, I went all day without; I wouldn’t ask, on purpose, from sulkiness! At night I had no light, I lay in the dark and I wouldn’t earn money for candles. I ought to have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies an inch thick on the notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and thinking. And I kept thinking … And I had dreams all the time, strange dreams of all sorts, no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy that.… No, that’s not it! Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid, that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won’t be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for every one to get wiser it will take too long.… Afterwards I understood that that would never come to pass, that men won’t change and that nobody can alter it and that it’s not worth wasting effort over it. Yes, that’s so. That’s the law of their nature, Sonia, … that’s so!… And I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who despises most things will be a law-giver among them and he who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!”
This illustration, Brooding, is from High School, sometime between ’95–’97 in my junior or senior year. We were reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime & Punishment, a book I remember having a hard time reading. I had to look up the passage that inspired my moody, teenage self.