High School Memories: Basic Art and Happy Little Trees

I learned basic art techniques in my freshman (1st) year of high school. The teacher's name was Mr. King. It's surprising I can remember a name from 1974, but I can't remember a name from last week! Anyway, he taught the basic art class and it's there that I first learned how to sketch landscapes. I lived in Hawaii at the time and it was a multiracial school including students of Hawaiian, Filipino, Portuguese, Guamanian, Samoan and Japanese ancestry, with a few mainland white people like my family thrown in for good measure. It was like a mini-melting pot, if you'd like to call it that.

The Art Teacher

Although Mr. King wasn't the best teacher in the world, he lived up to the task as best he could. He taught us the most basic of art techniques in areas such as sketching, water color painting, oil painting, lithography and silk screening. Reflecting on it, he actually did a pretty good job for a class that only lasted one semester.

I lost interest in anything art-related over the years, but I can still appreciate how difficult it is to create something of beauty with only an inspiration as your source.

Bob Ross

Bob Ross was a celebrity is his own right, but never the subject of celebrity gossip. He had a show that aired on the US Public Broadcasting Stations (PBS) and reruns are still aired to this day. The show was called "The Joy of Painting" and its initial run was from 1983 to 1995 (when he died).

In the painting world of Bob Ross, everything was happy. He was quoted as saying ""We don't make mistakes, we just have happy little accidents." Every time I watched an episode, he would always talk about making a "happy little tree" over here or over there on the painting.

Bob Ross used the wet oil on wet oil painting technique. Splotches of color would morph into beautiful paintings of imaginary landscapes in the course of an hour, and it would all happen before the paint was even dry.

Some of the techniques he used to create cliffs and trees were the exact same techniques I learned in basic art class, only I learned them for sketching and not for painting. Every once in a while, I'll sit down at a table and show a relative how to sketch a tree or a mountain and they're always impressed. I'm surprised I can even remember the details because that was well over 30 years ago.

Graphic Design

I often tell people that I don't have an artistic bone in my body. The truth is that I'm intimidated by graphic design programs for computers, and that's where most graphic design comes from. I would be lost if I tried to create any kind of brand design.

I've tried using Photoshop and The Gimp and I'm sorry, but I'm lost when I try anything more than basic stuff. Give me a pencil and a piece of paper and I'm fine. Stick one of those programs in my face and I'll quit before I even get started.

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