My best work as an artist

When I was a senior in college I had to have a senior review where all the art professors came looked at all my most recent work, what I was currently working on and what I was planning to do for my senior exhibition at the end of my senior year. I remember being so nervous. I had my hoodie rolled up in a ball because it was too hot to wear but I made sure that out of all the marvel characters on it, Nightcrawler was on top so he could give me support. I was proposing to do something new and experimental that had never been done at Keystone College before and I was terrified of being ripped apart.

One thing my friends and I used to do all the time was play board games. I was posing designing and making model board games. All I had for my senior review was an extremely rough prototype of what would be the keynote game of my exhibition. At the time of the review, it didn’t even have a title.

The bases of the game was set though. It centered on cards and dice. Each turn you got a card. On the card was a one or two sentence story. Some were illegal, some were funny, and almost all of them resorted in a good time. You rolled the dice to see if one of three things happened to your playing piece. You could get completely away with whatever the card said and move a large number of spaces, you could just barely get away and only move one space or you could get busted and have to move backwards.

I had many of these cards written out and spread out on tabled during my review. At that about sixty cards at that time. I remember two young female professors that I had had several times just pouring over the cards and having a lot of fun looking at everything on each card. I remember the former head of my department suggesting that I should see about the new 3D printer the department had just gotten but no one had used for any projects yet. I had been a student in the class of every one of the professors in the room (at least once) except for the current department head. Since I knew the other’s tastes and had presented work to the others before I was still nervous but less of them because I knew them at least a little. I knew very little about the department head and that scared me.

The best memory of that review was when he was looking at the cards. When he was scanning everything that was on the cards he complimented me. He commended me on being about to think of ideas and situations that where fitting to teens and young adults today. My graphic design professor had been standing behind me and I almost lose my composure when I heard him lose his under his breathe. That’s right, Dave! I hear that little laugh under your breath. ;-)