Doing, Instead of Just Learning

Over 2 years ago I graduated BYU with a BA in Humanities. "Cool, so what does that mean?" seems to be a fairly common question. Well, as I spent 4 1/2 years working on it, it actually means a lot more than I'm able to explain to people in the short answer they want. In a very, very small nutshell, I studied the arts. Not DOING the arts, just learning ABOUT the arts. It typically sounds like a useless major to people who don't understand that what I really learned was how to think, how to look for connections, how to see the way things fit together, how to formulate ideas, how to communicate effectively, and how to write. Really, there was so much good, useful stuff I learned that makes me such a better human being. That being said, what this post is really about is not the validity of my college major, but rather the fulfillment of a dream I've had for a long time. Sometimes it felt that while I spent all kinds of time in classes and in the library learning about the arts, and it always made me itch to learn how to create art.

I'm lucky to have made a good friend here in Virginia who is an artist, and she and I worked out a great deal. She wants to learn to play the piano, and I want to learn to paint. We are swapping lessons with each other to reach our goals. I've been working on a painting for a couple months and I've finally finished. It's an irregular size, so I'm still working on a framing solution. But it already has an intended place on a wall in the master bathroom.

This painting went through a few redos. Here's an early version:

 While this was looking ok, and I was happy with parts of it, in the end, the background was just WAY too drab for me. So I very carefully did a repaint of the background which I was much happier with!

This was done in acrylic on a piece of masonite. I found that the acrylic was more difficult to work with than I expected! It takes time to mix the colors and get them looking the way I wanted, but the paint dries SO FAST! It was always a struggle to know how much to mix up and how fast it was going to dry because it's super difficult to match the color if you try to mix it up again. Though it's far from perfect, I'm proud of my first project!