Amazing Grace sometimes takes effort

I'm going to school online; which believe me is about 10 times harder than going to a brick and mortar school. The classes are 5 and 1/2 weeks long and you get about 6 week total off a year. But sometimes in the middle of all the push and the pressure you find that the desire to better yourself pushes you farther than you ever thought possible.

You see in my infinite wisdom I decided to go to an Art school for Web Design. I've always had a good eye for color and lines and I've read so much about Art history it hasn't been too hard to translate it all into good design principals. But I have not ever been able to draw a thing. I can practically make Adobe Illustrator sit up and beg these days and use it to manipulate and finagle clipart most of the time for my working designs. It works, which is good, but it doesn't make me anywhere near some of the art I see on DeviantArt or other places on the net.

However the class I'm taking now may make me change my mind about myself. It's an elective, Graphic Symbolism, which i got into because I thought it would be mostly book work and since I live and breathe symbolism at time mostly easy. It's been the kind of trial that would make Sisyphus weep. The first week I needed to turn in 15 designs and this last week, while I had Bronchitis no less I'm having to turn in a total of 30. And, of course, none of them can be clip art.

So I started using clip art only as references...putting them in one layer of my Illustrator files while I erase through ellipses and use paint brushes over  the 'guide layer' until I get what I want. and somewhere in the middle of it I realized I was really painting. I started to just used what I know from taking apart clip art layers to make images that only existed in my own head. They are still rather crude but somewhere in this grind I became a digital painter; something I thought could never, ever happen. Something I have prayed and wished for, in vain, forever.

So i guess the lesson learned through aching hands and pounding head is this.... you can hope, wish and pray to God or the Gods. Do spells or put out positive energy to the universe until the day you die. But the only, only way you can make yourself over into more of what you want to be is risk yourself. Risk being in pain, being exhausted, being a nervous wreak; stretching yourself so far that every muscle in your body, mind and spirit cries out for relief. Because it's only there that you find out what you can truly do and a lot of times you surprise everyone, even yourself.

And my case in point..... a bowl, done with no clip art, no guide layers, nothing but me and my skills in Illustrator. And for me; a small quite miracle, for which i thank the Gods that gave me the strength and stubbornness not to just accept what is but stretch for what could be.