Your gateway to endless inspiration
Warnings!: Nope, not any today. I'm being possessed by the spirit of creativity right now and I NEED to yap. Shoutout to @h1ccu9 for just being incredibly nice and amazing, and to all of you for your support! It means a lot <3
Johnny has always been an artist, in his mind. It's a fact that permeates his whole being, though it didn't come about how most think it did.
There was no single moment when he decided that it would be what consumed every other free moment he has, no Christmas present that spurred creativity any more than the others.
Slowly, when he was younger. Stupid drawings of cartoons he'd liked, the typical stuff for a kid. Then, more quickly. In Chemistry, he was so bored of hexagons, of compounds bound by singe and double lines and rote memorization.
So, he started with circles. They were ugly, at first, but he picked up shading, and then it spilled outward.
Stupid drawings of his teachers, made to draw a chuckle from classmates, drawn with the 5-pack of pencils that would last the whole year, no matter what.
Even in his adult life, when what fills his sketchbook is chicken-scratch and sketches of buildings (only sometimes people) it's only pencil.
A quiet tribute to the young boy in a big house where money was tight. Colored pencils and good graphite would be wasted on him. He has what he needs in his palm, and he's used to that. Sometimes, black and white works well enough.
Price is somewhat similar, but his skill is technical. Sharp lines composed of quick flicks of a controlled wrist (never mind the slight ache when he repeats the motion too many times) come together to form rough ideas, a tool more for communication more than anything else.
It's not a skill borne from anything too creative, no, it just boils down to the things he needs to know. Maps, structures from top-down and isometric angles. Plans of attack represented by smooth, even arrows like men haven't died following paths he's drawn.
John doesn't like to draw outside of work, not when he remembers how many lives have been mistakenly cut short by how he controls the ballpoint pen.
He's tried, once or twice. It always ends in a deep, stabbing guilt that takes a practiced hand to shake from his shoulders.
Kyle didn't have an affinity for art until his teen years. He'd gone to museums, sure, he knew it took skill, but it had never really piqued his interest in the way it seemed to captivate some people he knows.
He'd been stressed when he picked it up from a friend. Squiggles encased in squiggles on the margins of the page. His English teacher did nothing but mark down his essays for it, but dammit did forcing himself to focus on something else work.
His mother had soon gifted him a set of ink-basked, black liner pens. Middle-of-the-road, in both quality and price, but it was more than enough.
A simple notebook had soon become a haven for him. Dots on dots on dots, lines, big, swooping curves, you name it, it's there.
He holds one rule: No "drawing".
Of course, this feels silly when he tells it to people, but it matters. If he goes into the project with a thought of a desired result, it will just frustrate him more, when it inevitably turns out as less-than-flawless.
So, it's all amorphous. Sometimes it's spiky, sometimes he's almost scarily methodical, adding more and more detail until a whole spread is swallowed up, and his head is mercifully clear.
It's enough to pull him in, but the art always lets him go again, and that's what he needs out of it.
Simon doesn't draw.
That's not to say he doesn't make art, but his is different.
Origami is his trade. It has been for a long time. He'd tear the corners out of pages in school binders, find ways to fold them to make them more interesting.
A book from the local library was what had taken it from a child's passing interest to the work of the rest of his life. More patterns. A way to understand how to make patterns, of his very own.
But, perhaps most importantly, origami was a simple, cheap hobby he could pay for with quarters found on the side of the road. And it was easy to hide
A shoebox beneath his bed was where it resided for about a decade, and then he enlisted.
His first tour, an acquaintance had given him a good set of proper origami paper. He can't remember their name for the life of him, but he remembers them every time he sits at his desk.
Actually, to be fair, he remembers them every time he enters his room at all.
The walls are adorned in paper sculptures, some truly origami, some not. Some composed of thousands of fold and over a hundred hours of work, and some just five-minute warm-up cranes.
It's a soothing reminder that his life is his, now. No matter how bitter the past may be, the tamed roughness of paper on his burned fingertips is there, and his mind gets to shut off as he takes on a project.
He knows how to make cranes by heart, now.