#art school

I loved working with that teacher too. He was the kind of crunchy art nerd whose own kid didn’t know what candy was, who loved bird watching and wearing tweed. We’d chat while they worked and it was just a three hour pleasure rather than work.

When the class switched from charcoal to gouache a devil medium, the evilest watercolor, the students struggled. We’d have in class painting where they’d spend the whole time trying to mix one color instead of just accepting something as good enough and trying to practice other skills.

So one day I showed up to my shift and announced, “I have stickers. If you get color down for the whole composition, you get a sticker.”

They wanted. The stickers. So bad. Students who had agonized before about keeping lines neat and perfect plowed ahead. The first student to call me over I tsked at. “Putting grey on everything doesn’t count,” I chided, “I asked for colors on each object.”

The classroom worked in furious joy, young adults who had seen my bird and cactus stickers and gone feral. The teacher was flabbergasted. “Why do they want stickers? They could just buy stickers…”

I held up my water bottle and showed him a tiny 3D bubble sticker the program director had brought to my game teams space last week. “You never grow out of wanting to earn a sticker.”

.

.

.