I Am Not A Sculptor

I would love to be great at working with clay. And paint for that matter. But there's something about the messiness of it that makes it very difficult to want to work with it at all. In my head, I always feel like it's something that will go smoothly, but when I start to do them, it all goes to hell.

I was working on the soles of shoes, which I cut from this weird plasticine clay, that I've discovered only dries about an 1/8" deep and then refuses to dry. So I cut a sole shape and thinned it out so it could dry more and I'll try again later. Wheeeeee, isn't that fun? Nope, but I'm still determined to make it work somehow.

Look, I was this way with the Pen Tool in Illustrator. Hated it. Wanted to do everything freehand, damn those spectacular greeting-card-worthy, smooth lines. But I had a teacher that insisted we learn how to use it. To pay him back, I made my project, this rainbow vomit ad that hurt the eyes looking at it. But I also went on to make some electronic-paper-dolls using the Pen Tool and somewhere along the way, I fell in love with it. Yet I'll never forget how much I despised it at first. Because that feeling is what I need when I try something new that I swear I hate. I have to remember that someday I can fall in love with it, if I keep at it.

So it's down to that and YouTube because I have no good got-damn how to put together some doll boots. If the clay soles don't work out passably, I do have cork I can try to shape and paint. I wish someone made these boots, but they're specific to a design and I haven't the fundage to pay an artist what they deserve to put up with making them for me. So, I learn to do things myself and hope for the best. Being creatively diverse, a lot of people expect I can do a lot of things I can't really do that well. "If you can do that, you'll LOVE this!" but no. Sometimes, we're not particularly good at everything and just happen to work at something enough to be lucky in making something passable.

I'm reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Good book, hard to put down. lol Okay, no, it isn't hard to put down. Nothing is hard for me to put down. It's harder to pick things back up, no matter how much I think I want to. I'm a crap starter so I try to finish as much as I can in one sitting because it's hard to motivate myself again.

As for writing, I wrote about 4K words today. I know I said I wasn't doing word count, just time spent writing, but I had to miss a few days writing to prep for my nephew's birthday and it just so happens I started a brand new chapter so everything in the word count bar for that scene was from today. Makes it easier to figure word count when it's staring at you. I didn't set out to write that much and it's not exactly ground-breaking writing, but I certainly didn't expect to do so much after being so exhausted and distracted. This is why expectations are a really crappy gauge for actuality.

Well, I guess I should hop off. Try to edit a screenplay and finish this book. I'll do one or the other or both and whatever doesn't get done waits another day. Saving up for a writing computer this week to make things a little easier. Love my iMac but I don't have the patience to let it load shit like I do when I'm drawing or other more intensive things. Kinda just want to open a nice little laptop and get going. It's gonna be a cheapie one, an HP Stream, but it'll do the job. Mostly, I'm running my shit through cloud storage anyway so it won't need any impressive features. The only thing I aim to put on it is Scrivener anyway.

Anyways, peace out. Hoping this week goes great. Get me a haircut, a computer and go out for lunch one day. Keeping it humble.