Monday, January 10, 2011

Black Velvet, if you please...




I once aspired to be an artist.  No, not in the musical way I ended up.  A velvet poster artist.  You know, those unfinished color your own posters?  With the black velvet?  That.

My first work of velvet artistry was completed circa 1978.  You haven’t seen it?  No really, like in a gallery or on Antique Roadshow?  I thought it was that great. It was commissioned on my 9th birthday.

I was fucking serious about it.  I marveled as I unwrapped the unfinished portrait of a Unicorn running and smashing through an oversized rainbow.  It was awesome, but needed my artistic touch.  I was going to break out and get discovered, I just knew it. 

My work ethic really came into play as I colored the allocated white spaces with my half dried markers. I even referenced books on the proper order of colors on a rainbow. Have to be accurate about those kind of things..

The unicorn was a bit of a challenge as most I had seen were already white.  But the velvet artist in me knew I had to be different…set myself apart from the others.  “Pink!” I said to myself.  “With a purple horn…”

I stayed up late and woke early. Painfully but thoughtfully choosing between 9 marker colors…The white areas dispersed between the black velvet haunted me.

And after 2 days, my art was complete.  I swelled with pride as the unicorn finally came to life.  The rainbow colors really popped.  In modern adult lingo, “It was the shit”…

I hung it on my bedroom door for all my family members to admire.

I need some good heavy metal music now…See ya…











4 comments:

  1. I was also a fan...we called them Doodle Arts for some reason! The simple joys of childhood huh? I remember doing lots of toucans! :)

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  2. Peggy - Toucans...I remember those too...But felt unicorns were more my genre.

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  3. Love those. Used to buy those for my girls when they were little. I pictured them, like you, laying around, happily coloring. Sadly,they never got quite as into it as you.

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