Hooked on Graffiti

I joined Facebook recently so I could stay in touch with my Kalamazoo friend Denise, whom I miss terribly, and stay vicariously in touch with my son, who recently left for school. Have you joined Facebook, or a similar site? There's just nothing like getting your page all set up and seeing there, in writing, for all the world to read: "You have 0 friends."

I spent some time getting silly with all the different applications...here's a hint: don't send your college freshman a flair button that says 'I heart my little boy'. He won't respond with glee. In fact, he won't respond at all, to anything, ever. Which is as it should be.

I really got sucked into the graffiti, however, which is just Paint, basically. I studied the posted graffiti and spent a ton of time figuring out how to upload images, because obviously some of them were photographs. Turns out none of them are photographs, they just look like it. AND some of the most impressive ones are done solely with a mouse, although a lot of people use wacom tablets. So now I spend my evenings obsessively trying to mouse draw something that doesn't look, as my friend Denise puts it, 'like something a second grader drew'. Frankly, in my case, that's insulting to the second grader.

This is one of my first efforts. It's my dog, Neo, or at least the top half of his head. You know what is even harder than drawing in graffiti? Writing in graffiti. Here's a more recent one...I haven't gotten better, but I've learned a few tricks...draw things that are naturally messy, like sunflowers. Have a dramatic background...people will look at the colors and not so much at your drawing. Draw things that are made of circles...graffiti will do those for you. Draw things that are tiny and hard to see, and probably moving anyway, like bugs. Draw things that are naturally irregular and crooked, like tree branches.