Here is another of my early posts… so you don’t have to ever go to the trouble of going back and reading all of them yourself…

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So I can’t recall if I mentioned that I dropped out of high school. It was 1977, and I was 17. At the time, I thought I was too smart to waste my time on public education, which goes a long way towards showing how I can be both smart and stupid at the same time… (In fairness, I still have some problems with the school system in this country, which new international statistics are bearing out as we speak)…

But the Gods bless America, because here, a drop out can go to college. I did get my GED, and qualified, after extensive Navy testing, to become anything in the Navy except a nuclear submarine technician and a few other tech ratings I can’t remember now. (I most likely wouldn’t have qualified for a top security clearance either, but whatever.)… I scored dismally on the math portions of all the tests, but the parts where you look at flattened shapes and try to figure out what they would fold into in 3D, I was off the charts on that.

So I figured, because I had dreams of becoming a computer game designer, that I should take some basic computer classes and some computer arts classes. Nothing useful came from this experience, unless you count that psychological profile from the study skills class I mentioned earlier that told me about the strangely lopsided function of the half of my brain I can actually use.

You need proof that I ever attended an institution of higher learning, you say? Well, here it is…

So there I was, in 1995 and 96, at community college. I was 35 years old when I returned, and I had not been to school in almost 20 years. My computer arts class was taught by a pure-blooded Chiricahua Apache who was also an ex-special forces soldier who served in Vietnam. A nice guy, I loved him, but not someone you would want to piss off… We were using D Paint, a dinosaur of a graphics program that allowed you to place one colored dot, or pixel, on the screen at a time. (You can do this in Photoshop if you want to create original art, but it is slow and takes a long time to learn.)  Some of my fellow students did some incredible art in D Paint by the end of the class.

Here is my first project, the subject of which we got to pick ourselves. I had to recreate this simple image of a well-loved celebrity icon…

Here is how it turned out…

Go ahead and laugh… I will wait… That is the very first picture that I ever created on a computer from scratch. I could have cheated and scanned it, then painted over the old image. This was back when I was just starting to play with Photoshop and put my head in things, which is a much faster and easier way to produce art, but not nearly so satisfying in the long run…

Project number 2, and we were supposed to pick a slightly more complex image to duplicate. I found this picture in an old Pirates of the Caribbean book from Disneyland…

Sorry about the tape on his face… I cut him out of the book so I could stick him up on the computer monitor beside my version while I worked… It helped with sizing issues and made it so I didn’t have to glance up and down all the time… (see, my brain is always [sort of] working)…

I was getting a little better…

Sorry about the quality of this image. I couldn’t find it on any of the old disks, but I had printed it once, to put in one of the binders full of artwork I have, so I scanned it. But quality issues aside, you must admit I was improving… slowly…

For the next project, I decided to do an original picture… so there would be nothing to compare it to… (except the artwork of the other students, unfortunately)…

This was going to be an awesome picture of a skeleton playing an organ…

I never finished it, but someday I will!!!

For the last project, I got a little distracted. (It happens)… I never finished this one either, (yet)… but I did get bonus points for pure variation… I turned in multiple unfinished versions.

Oh, yeah, me as a Samurai… It was… (is)… going to be awesome…

It started off as rough line sketches, and gradually took form…

I added details, like my face… which was a Photoshop import, and should never have been in there… and changed stuff, went back to earlier versions, got bogged down in details…

Then I started playing with backgrounds, textures, and water effects…

And clouds and sky and…

Color… need more color…

Whoa… way too much color…

OK, really??? Samurai at a Grateful Dead concert???  (Some of you may notice that this version has metallic gradient fills in the armor, which can be done in Photoshop, but not in D Paint. I was now blatantly cheating… I had gone rogue!)… My teacher knew, but we were friends by now, and he appreciated my efforts if not my product.

Here is the more or less best semi-done final project…

I also managed to pass the class on the strength of my essays… He was big on essays that would force students to be more aware of how they looked at the world,… the difference between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’… and essays where we had to really describe the hell out of some complex object, that sort of thing…

Someday I will post my essays from that class… they are very good, so remind me later… But not quite yet. Tomorrow we will finish up my college years. I am sorry I didn’t post yesterday. The computer died. My wife, who is a computer genius, fixed it. She thinks I opened up a retro-virus when I opened all these old pictures… (It’s like the devil is hiding inside my art)…