SHARE YOUR WORLD 2-21-2022

I have a headache. I’ll be right back. First, I need a couple of Excedrin.

I got two Excedrin, but lost them between the kitchen and the living room. Considering it’s just about 12-feet from the closet where I keep the Excedrin in the kitchen, to the living room where I sit — and there are no stops in between, you might wonder where they went. I might wonder, but I’m giving up wondering. It’s just one of those things.

You can be pretty sure your career as a portrait artist has not taken off when the person you are portraying looks at the picture and says, “Nice, but who is it?” Since it was supposed to be Garry, I figured I had not yet grasped that ability to make the drawing look like an individual but at least he looked human — which is a big step up from previous drawings.

He pointed out I got the skin color pretty accurately. When I was in elementary school, ALL my pictures of people had brown skin. This was because the “people-skin” crayon color looked like pink plastic. As a very (very) young artist, I was sure no one actually had skin that color except for vinyl baby dolls and Band-Aids. Brown was a lot closer to at least some people’s skin tone and looked a lot more human, so all my people were brown.

I bought this set of “portrait” pencils a while ago because they were on sale and I wanted to try Prismacolors. They are supposed to be the premium colored drawing pencils. Also, they sell portrait sets in three versions: Dark, Medium, and Light. These are medium and you can do almost any color of skin (except very light) using them. I wanted to try them. I was dreaming about my portrait career last night, but in my dream, my portraits were much better. Practice, practice, practice.

Prismacolors are much softer than Castle Arts pencils. I don’t think they are better, just different. Also, these are not watercolor pencils. Not that watercolor pencils have been working out well. To get them to work, you have to draw in layers from the lightest to the darkest colors — and you have to let the paper dry completely in between each layer.

This requires a lot more patience than I’ve got. Letting a piece of 90 pound paper dry completely makes a simple drawing brutal, but NOT doing it is worse. If you don’t wait for the paper to dry, everything comes out looking like mud. When I’m ready, I’ll try watercolors. The real thing, not colored pencils made wet.

And now, on the the questions!

What’s the most useful thing you know?

When the orange light in your camera is flashing, do not wait. Change the battery.

What impact do you think it would have on the world if bananas were illegal?

I would eat different fruit and no longer make banana bread. Is pot still legal? Because I could still make dopey bread, even without bananas. What a great world where Cannabis is legal but bananas are not.

What social stigma does society need to just get over?

Racism, religious extremism, and everything else. Just get over it while we are still here and CAN get over it. Since I think we are working on not being here at all, we need to hurry and dispose of that crap soon.

Do you prefer the moral viewpoint of consequentialism, which focuses on the consequences of actions, or deontology which focuses on the innate rightness or wrongness of the actions themselves?  

I don’t see how one works without the other. If there’s no inherent right and wrong, what kind of consequences can you have? First you need to establish a baseline before you can expect (or require) a consequence.

Besides, as long as you remember to change the battery when the “change battery” light is flashing, what could possibly go wrong?

Categories: #SYW, Anecdote, Ethics and Philosophy, Humor, Share My World, time

Tags: #SYW, humor, Marilyn Armstrong, Share My World