Going Dotty

The other day when I was looking at elvie studio by Lori Vliegen I saw her post about the mighty micron and watched the video - The Making of "Hero"- a drawing of Miguel Endara's dad "composed entirely out of 3.2 million ink dots." Did he count as he was dotting away or did they do some kind of mathematical estimation?

Hennyway, this reminded me of a dotty picture that I once started but never finished

Why didn't you finish it? you may ask.

Well, way back in 1989 I was having a great time dotting away with my 0.1mm pen. Stippling, as it is called, afforded me time to ponder deep and meaningful things and I loved how the picture developed one dot at a time. I stippled at home and I stippled at school. This dotty picture was (was) to be my major work for 3 unit Art in the HSC and I spent a great deal of time on it.

One day I was called out of Biology to go to the principal's office. That was not a normal occurrence for me and it caused me a great deal of stress just wondering why on earth I should be called. I soon found out. The principal solemnly declared that something terrible, something devastating had happened - someone had spilt photographic chemicals on my major work.

I didn't burst into tears. I stood in stunned silence. Maybe I was in shock.

Then the principal said something that, to this day, I cannot fathom.
He said, "Would you like me to do the art work again for you?"

"WHAT!?!?!?!?!" (That's me now. Then, I just said, "No thank you.")

I don't remember if we brainstormed ideas then or later but no idea that the principal came up with was good enough for me. My picture was wrecked and I didn't want to do it all over again. I didn't want to do anything else either. In the end I just did some sketches and some paintings of various animals, mounted them on black cardboard and handed them in. It was done and I was disappointed.

Today, when I went to look for my dotty elephant I had a momentary panic, thinking that I had thrown it out in a fit of ruthlessness. And that might have been fine except that I knew that I didn't have a photo of it. It's okay now. I have a photo. I have a blog post.

So there you go - one random blog post by someone I do not know helped me remember something from a long time ago. I'm still a little bit sad about it.