Ben Crowder

“Early Christmas,” a quick painting I did in Photoshop last night just for fun:

I’ve started doing a little more painting in Brushes on my iPhone. This one is called “Roadfall”:

Brushes also has a very cool feature where you can export a stroke-by-stroke Quicktime video of your painting, via the Brushes Viewer app. Here’s Roadfall’s:

I’ve still got a long way to go with my painting skills, but it’s nice to see some progress. And to once again see the miracle of going from those first initial strokes (“Ew, this is pathetic — it isn’t going anywhere”) to the final stroke (“Okay, this isn’t great, but it’s good enough that I can live with it”). Art is a miracle.

Got the urge to start painting again, so I did this in Photoshop:

For some obscure reason, painting smoke is really, really fun. :)

Here I am writing plays, but do I actually read any? I realized today that if I don’t see what else is out there — and see it in script form, not just on stage — then I’m going to get into a rut where I’m effectively writing the same play over and over again. I can already sort of feel it happening, in fact. My four plays so far have widely different subject matter, but — to me, at least — they feel uncannily similar.

It’s not just playwriting, of course; in any creative area, you have to provide grist for the mill. Life gives you plenty of ideas for the content, but to study the craft, you really have to look at what else is out there. This morning I was reading Patrick Kavanaugh’s book Spiritual Lives of Great Composers and came across this quote about J.S. Bach:

Bach’s brother owned a set of compositions, which he forbade the younger Bach to use. Perhaps because it was placed off-limits, that musical manuscript grew irresistibly attractive to the young musician. And so for weeks, Bach stole the precious pages and hid them in his room, where he stayed up late night after night copying the musical scores by moonlight. When his brother discovered the copied pages, he angrily confiscated them. But Bach had already gleaned valuable lessons in composition, as well as discipline and devotion to music, from the clandestine exercise.

I bought a book of staff paper today and checked out some Beethoven and Mozart pieces so I can start copying scores. :) You see, it’s been so long since I’ve done any composition that I feel like I’ve almost completely lost touch with that world. I’ve been forgetting the language of music notation. And the structure and theory behind music? Merely a memory.

I’m not saying all that is necessary to write music. It’s not. But for me, without it I feel like I’m churning out the same thing over and over again, never growing or expanding, never deepening beyond the shallow waters in which I start. To get past that, I need to study the works of the great musicians. (That’s more important, in my opinion, than studying the theory. But I happen to be rather fond of music theory, too. :))

And I need to start reading plays. And poetry, if I ever want to break out of the mold I’ve been in for years. (I rarely read poetry, so it’s no surprise that my own poems sound like carbon copies. In fact, I think they’re almost all in one of two or three different meters. It’s sad.) Particularly poetry that isn’t like the poetry I write. And the more plays I read, the more my understanding of the guts of theatre will expand, and I’ll produce better work. It’s exciting. :)

(One of these days I do intend to start painting again, by the way…)

The other day I bought some paper for inking and a new paintbrush. Drew this fellow on the right:

After I finished, I had an urge to do watercolors, so I pulled out the dinky little set I have, chucked the pathetic little brush that came with it, and used my nice new squirrely brush to paint this girl in a lake. The brush made all the difference. (The other thing that made a difference was pencilling out my drawing first, rather than just painting from scratch.) Anyway, this my first real watercolor, and it does indeed have problems (the blotch on her hair, the weird skin coloring, etc.), but it’s a start. And it successfully managed to get me to stop loathing watercolors and start loving them. :) As for the story behind it, I originally just had the girl’s head and the suit coat, and then I put the sky behind her, and then I wanted to extend the suit but I messed up and it looked so much like a lake that I decided to make that the picture instead. :)