I loved the chaos that nature brought (new drawing, 2/4/08)

February 4, 2008 at 7:30 pm (art, drawing, interesting, painting, personal, teaching, thoughts) (cats, pencil)

So, tragedy befell the Wilson-Edwards household today when my beloved mechanical pencil started showing some real signs that it’s about to leave us. The nib now wiggles too much, an obvious result of having been leaned on one too many times, and I should probably replace it tomorrow. Given that it cost (I don’t know) $2.95 at the nearby Rite Aid and I bought it about four years ago (meaning that it has served me for literally a couple hundred drawings), I shouldn’t be sad to see it go… but I am. I love that stupid mechanical pencil. As picky and anal as I am about my supplies, that’s the one thing I have absolutely not wavered on since I got it; I simply considered it superior to all other mechanical pencils in the universe. And now, it’s time for it to go… sigh.

So this might be the last drawing I complete with it. If it’s not the last drawing, then it’s definitely the next-to-last, since working on it was much harder than usual since I had to compensate for that wiggling nib (oh, and it goes without saying that The Wiggling Nibs would be a great name for a back-up band). And of course, I was smack in the middle of a larger piece when all this happened… good lord, hadn’t realized how upset I was about this stupid pencil til I started writing this…

Anyway. Point is, this is watercolor, pencil (*sob*), and collage on paper, about 9 x 24 inches. Here’s an overall image:

The dimensions of this drawing don’t exactly make it bloggerific, so I also made a detail that’s probably a little more clear:

It contains one of my favorite stories from teaching ever, left over from this summer. I was showing a group of high school kids a video of The Way Things Go and, when the lights came up, the very first question was from probably the best student in class. She asked, in a way that was so fraught with fear and dread that there’s no way I can actually capture it here, “Who cleaned up that mess when they were done?”