Flashback

As our fellow work-at-home artists would probably agree, an art studio can get pretty messy. I always do my best to clean up the area around my desk after each project, but rarely do I have the time to tackle the entire studio. One of the goals we had been wanting to accomplish for the past several months was to clean up and re-organize our studio supply closet. 

Even more junk lurks behind that door.

We finally got the chance to begin the task during the holidays. We made an even bigger mess dragging everything out of the closet and stacking it into piles in our workspace and hallway which forced us to finish the job quickly if we wanted to reclaim our home office.

We pawed through big cardboard boxes full of unused canvases and drawing pads, old paintings, scraps of matboard, and various other odds and ends. We also looked through a half-dozen old portfolios of artwork to see what was worth keeping and what wasn't. There were product design drawings from our time at The Franklin Mint and concept drawings Vinod did at Ravensoft. There was a lot of my student work from Ringling. There was also artwork from my childhood, some of which was close to 25 years old. We pulled out drawing after drawing, sharing (and laughing over) our old artistic triumphs and failures.

When I was taking my first art classes as a child, for some reason drawing with colored pencil on black board was all the rage. Maybe the cool effect of the bright colors standing out against the dark paper gave kids like me a greater sense of accomplishment. I had a bunch of these old colored-pencil-on-black drawings including this totally rad name plate I made, probably circa late elementary–early middle school:

I think maybe this belongs on my new business card...

*So who remembers the video game Flashback?  I didn't have the right system to play it on, so I rented a Sega Genesis solely to play that game. I guess my love for Flashback hinted that Blade Runner would eventually become one of my favorite movies.