I Did the Thing!

Hey guys!

   Yes, I have done the thing. If you don't know the beginning of the story, click here to see that post.

   Well, if you did read that, you know that I entered two drawings (one pencil and one pen-and-ink) into the localish fair, and that I signed up to do a demonstration.

   Yesterday I did just that! I was surprisingly calm (thank you God!) and packed up printed out pictures to draw, pencils, everything I would need. Dad packed the food (since we would be there from 2 to 6, meaning 4 straight hours), I listed to Peter Hollen's cover of Baba Yetu all the way there, and we made it safely.

   Let's just get straight that I don't really like fairs. Actually, I think I've only been to a few when I was pretty young, so I couldn't say much about them before now. The sound of kids screaming combined with the buzzing of rides, the shady teenagers continually flipping their overgrown bangs out of their faces and always hanging on their significant-other's arm, and the smell of animal exhibits are not appealing to me.

    But I wasn't their to see the sights. Inside the long building, before we went looking for the superintendent, I went through the 'fine arts' exhibits. Adults, young adults (older teens), little kids, and finally 'youth' (younger teenagers).

   Immediately I looked for my stippling, and found it with a '1st' on the tag.

   Then, on the same wall, my pencil drawing of Rachel McAdams was labeled '1st' with a blue ribbon next to it.

   I beamed, having not expected a blue ribbon. But then I noticed something peculiar. In the group of entries, more than half of them were placed 1st. Then the rest were 2nd, and only a couple were 3d. I suppose some people look at that as 'everyone's a winner', but I find it a hallow victory. I mean, if everyone wins, no one wins, because there's no real competition . I was looking for the 1st, 2nd, 3d, and the rest would be honorable mentions. But only a few had ribbons, which made me feel better about the system of judging.

   What do you do with ribbons, anyway? Hang them on your wall or something? (I never thought I'd have to ask this)

   I also noticed another pencil sketch, of (and called) Amy Pond. Man, I wish the girl who drew that was there when I was. It was a great sketch, too.

   After quickly looking to where I had placed, we found the lady who was in charge and she gave me the choice of two tables, one next to someone else (a guy with a bunch of model aircraft) or one all by itself in the middle of the hall.

   I picked the one next to Mr. Aircraft and spread my drawings around. The guy wasn't annoying or anything, it's just that because different people came by at different times, he had to tell the dumpster story one too any times, and that was annoying.

   Mom and Dad went off to enjoy the fair, and Willow stuck with me (since she decided that she doesn't like fairs at all).

Willow, the every cheerful, helpful, and uplifting spirit.

   Look at that, she's looking up sarcastically at my caption :) Anyway, she was good company as I started to finish my first drawing.

   I had been working on this drawing of Mason (Aidan Turner) for a while, but had never gotten around to finishing the background. But now was the perfect time, so I whipped it out and started on completing it. This is the end product, a bit sloppy, but I like it, though it still needs some work.

   One of the things I found is that when drawing in a warm environment, your hands can get rather sweaty. Which means when you try to smear the pencil led for shading, it sort of sticks to the page more, so you can't get it off when you want to, and it's uneven. It gets all over your fingers and hand. But as my teacher had told me, I ripped a piece of clean paper and put it on where my hand rests on the page, and the led didn't smear there like it normally would. Basically, it prevents this...

   After that I started a brand new drawing of a photo I pulled off of the internet. It was also a bit sloppy, but I'm going to try and fix it up sometime soon.

   And then I started another, this one fanart. It's of the Winter Soldier and Cap's shield (not yet colored, of course). I didn't get to finish it, by the time I had gotten halfway through, it was already six.

Me drawing the Winter Soldier...

 

   A good number of people stopped and looked at the drawings I had displayed and commented on them. Since it was senior day, the nice old people said how they liked it. A few asked how old I was. One thing I learned from this is that from now on I'm going to stop and tell the demonstrators how I like their stuff. It feels really great to hear what people think, and it's sort of disappointing if they don't say anything.

All in all, it went really well. Thanks to you guys who encouraged me on this, it was real helpful :)

Post again soon!

Sincerely,

Darrion