Description

At first, this was going to be another "Lookit me do pretty" picture, but as I painted, the meaning kind of shifted and became more autobiographical.

Everybody has some dream, some thing they did when they were little (five. Six. Seven .Eight) that passed the time away. Knights and dragons with a paper towel roll and a cape made out of a blanket. Or a cartoon show they loved that was about two years young for them. Everybody had a time when the only limit to their imagination was their own, and everything was full of brightness and sun.

The people who taught us to limit ourselves were never the grown-ups. They came later, but the first teachers were kids our own age. They forgot about the sunshine, and want everyone else to forget too. They teased you and smashed your dreams until you put all the pretty things into a box labled "kids stuff" and moved on.

This became a represntation, to me, of that moment before the purest sort of innocence is lost, when the other children found you and envied the fact that you still remember how to stand in the sun.

Technical stuff: way, way, way too much time. Modified a few of Photoshop's default brushes for the leaves and some of the texture work, though a lot more of it was freehanded.

Wacom Intros tablet, and about two weeks worth of time.

CW