Sometimes, I make art about what I think are difficult and serious subjects, like love and relationships and the nature of reality.
Extremely weird, diffusive art that I’ve made
And sometimes, I make Perler bead art.
Most of the time, art involves our very best work and talents - critical thinking combined with communication and a sense of style. Art takes all of this and more.
Sometimes art doesn’t require any of this. That’s the cool thing about art.
Balancing between high-stakes, high-demand art and low-stakes art has become, well, a bit of an art for me in my creative life.
A narrative scifi epic of 100+ pages, Tilted Sun is the result of me writing, drawing, inking, lettering and planning a comic. It’s been a year-over-year project. Comics are usually made by 8 people for a reason!
When you take a step back, a lot went into Tilted Sun and still goes into it each day when I work on my art.
I’ve also done paintings like this one, a 30 foot tall acrylic which hung in Norlin Library at CU Boulder, seen by thousands of people per day.
The other thing about painting is … it’s hard. Even a tiny painting is hard to do sometimes.
To supplement my current work in comics (hardmode) and painting (death hard mode), My recent low-stakes side project is resin casting.
All that I have to do with resin is mix it up, find something to embed in it, and pour the resin and the thing into little trinket moulds.
Now, that said, resin casting isn’t always low stakes - if you want, it can be a huge undertaking. Entire tables can be coated in hundreds of dollars of resin. It’s also possible to encase musical instruments in resin - such as guitars - where if the pour is unideal, the stakes at hand are both the cost and time of the resin pour, and the cost of the instrument. … Yikes …
Anything, any kind of art can be extremely serious if you want it to be.
Yet for me, right now, resin is my little pet project where I make trinkets that nobody, not even me, is worried about.
No clients are wringing their hands over the quality or artistic merit of my extremely average resin casts. If the resin casts turn out wonky, I lose, at most, fifteen bucks and a couple minutes.
It’s great to go after big things in art - it is also incredibly scary and full of failure and twists and turns. So, sometimes, I need to make a smaller thing to have a sense of completion, however small, in the midst of a longer journey.
Low stakes art has been especially helpful for me during COVID-19 measures, where I am staying in or near my house 95% of the time. Small pieces of art help me feel like I am making - at least- something, even though I can’t go out and meet my friends or move my art forward in other ways.
Until next time!
Related blogs:
Why Art Seems to Predict the Future
Tilted Sun - Sci Fi Fantasy Comic
Sketchbook Confessional - March 2020
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