Visual

As I get more into doing woodworking and blacksmithing and other similar things, and I try to find more ways to incorporate into the other things I am trying to get into and things that I already enjoy, I wish more and more that I had an artistic bone in my body. I have these ideas that I would love to act out upon, but I lack the artistic fine motor skills to actually act upon them. Things like trying to carve statues of characters, or burn them into wood that I am using to create other things. This would be especially good in starting to play D&D - to create items for the different players at the end of a campaign with designs that symbolize their characters and what they went through.

If I knew some way that I could learn to do these things, I would love to do so. More likely than not it will come from me taking extra pieces I have at the end of a project and doodling around with them until I slowly start to learn more about what I'm doing. Which isn't necessarily a bad way to go about it, it just means that I'm starting from a very low point without much guidance on how to proceed. It definitely sounds like a fun challenge, and if I could ever somehow miraculously get to a point where I could actually create wooden figures of characters that I have written, I couldn't imagine a much more satisfying thing I could possibly do. To physically surround myself with the characters from my own mind that I have fallen in love with - I'm not sure I could ask for much more.

But that's a long road to travel to get there. I have friends who are very artistic, and I would love to try and turn to them for help and guidance. I'm good at finishing out the small details - with woodworking, that means doing the sanding to smooth things out, to slowly and meticulously correct angles, surfaces, and other minor mistakes. But when it comes to the bigger picture, and creating the majority from which to do those corrections? Well, that's another story entirely. It may sound weird when you read it that way, but believe me - on wood, I'm much better at fixing the small stuff than making the big stuff.

Right now I'm just working off of kits and premade instructions, but eventually I'd like to expand. To make my own creations. To understand what it is that I'm actually doing, rather than just following what others tell me. I guess that's how I should really be approaching life, while I'm at it. But I think that's a conversation that's going a bit too deep for what I'm looking at tonight.