Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Creative Interests

Creastive Interests

Several years ago on a trip to Atlanta to visit my wife’s parents, I escaped when Linda and her mother went off to shop for girly things and her father plopped himself down to watch the young girls walk by.

Girl watching is a big activity in Atlanta and one never gets too old to enjoy the activity. Even Southern women on the hefty side have a knack for making themselves look good. After sitting with my father-in-law for a few minutes I excused myself and started walking around. It was a big place and I happened upon a specialty hobby shop that dealt in Miniatures. I have always liked Hobby shops so I went inside and seated at a long table were young men and women painting plastic and cast (pot metal) miniatures.

Scattered around were dioramas of various period scenes, may battles where these figures where armies in various stages of a classic battle. Then there were fantasy depictions showing Lord of the Rings Characters. I was so fascinated I bought a couple boxes of figures, some paints and brushes as well as a How-To book on how to go about achieving such amazing results.

Upon returning to Wisconsin the bag with all the stuff went into my closet and got forgotten to the point where I no longer remembered where it was. In my EWW course I got into character development and the importance of developing character images and remembered my purchase and spent three days to no avail looking for where I put them. Finally Linda found them and I read the book and cut the pieces out. Concurrently I went on line to see what the state of the art was and discovered an amazing assortment of these figures rendered in a way that filled my sense of wonder with the “WOW” factor.

I also found an amateur illustrator who I will contact to do some sketches for my Essence and the Stones series. This artist not only can draw but has an unbelievable imagination and knack for drawing fantasy figures without going into the ozone.

I find that my foray’s through the antique shops and looking on line at great art helps fill my decanter of creative energy back to over flowing. Several of my students commented that the course did that for them and they couldn’t wait to get started writing. Since the course ended the operational tempo really slowed down and when Karen’s computer went down my e-mail slowed to a snail’s pace of activity. If I were to graph the intensity curve of my email it would look like a heart monitor with spikes and valleys… Nobody can say my life has flat-lined at this point.