Steen's home of the certainly strange
I have decided to start a portrait series of watercolor paintings, based on the peripheral characters my siblings and I invented in our LEGO games. Since Doc has just given me a ton of art supplies for my birthday, I decided that it was high time I started painting this series.
My plan is to finish the whole series, then frame them and give them to my siblings as gifts.
I have finished the first portrait in the series, so here it is along with his bio:
Well, the 20th was 24 Hour Comic Book Day, and it was the first one I have ever participated in. I did it at Mission Comics and Art which did an excellent job hosting the event. It was also surreal seeing drunk people come in to look at or buy comics at 2 AM. One woman in a group of people that stumbled by, fresh out of a bar, shouted “Guys! Look at this comic book! No, look at this comic book!” but her friends were not so excited about doing a late-night comic run as she was so they walked on.
As a child, I did not smile or laugh as a response to the emotions I felt. I would laugh in response to physical stimuli, such as when being tickled, but that was it. This first presented a problem for me when I was enrolled in dance classes. Each class had an annual dance recital, and as part of that performance we had to smile.
When I was first asked to smile during practice, I did my best approximation of a toothy smile, learned entirely through observation. The teacher seemed satisfied by this attempt, but after a while of my consistently smiling in this way, some of the girls in the class told me quite frankly, “You smile weird.” Indeed I can hardly blame them, my smile was weird. Almost terrifyingly so. I would pull back my lips and show both rows of teeth, as big as I could, and for some reason I favoured the right side of my mouth. I know this from looking at my old dance photos, which I’m now embarrassed to look at what I once thought was a totally normal smile. In light of this new information, in order to perform the dance correctly, I decided to teach myself how to smile.