Surreality
Well, there’s kind of a lot going on right now. In exactly one month my fiancé (Nick) and I will be getting married, next weekend is our bachelor/bachelorette party, something was wrong with our pipes so for a few days we had no water, now we have water but no hot water, I’m making my own wedding dress (with lots of much-appreciated help from a friend), I’m starting to get this website and my business as an artist up and running, also looking for a new job so I can leave full-time teaching at a public elementary school so I have more time and energy to devote to my art/business/website and wedding… and this weekend Nick and I are joining a new D&D campaign! So the art I have for my first blog on my new website is of my Tiefling bard character that I was so excited to come up with that (even though I have a million things to do) I just had to make a quick watercolor painting of! Also, yeah, I decided to start writing a blog on my new website as I’m still working on getting it ready to be published, and I decided I will include some sort of quick sketch or work in progress with every blog post I write.
That being said, I can’t say how frequently I’ll be writing blog posts or how long they’ll be, but I can tell you about my character I made for the D&D campaign! Her name is Surreality. Tieflings typically either have an infernal name they were given when they were born, or a virtue name that they sought out and is meant to embody a wish, goal or life-path. A virtue name can be pretty much anything, so I decided to create a theatre-nerd bard whose motivation comes from visions in her dreams of a fantastical, other-dimensional being named “David Bowie” and she decided to name herself Surreality to epitomize her ideal path in life. Nick and I haven’t had the chance to play a D&D campaign before but we’ve been thinking about starting one for a long while now, so I think this will be really fun! And the sessions aren’t going to be too often (especially at the start, we’ll get more into it after the wedding) so it’s not going to take much time away from wedding preparations.
Even though it seems like a lot I actually feel really good about getting everything I want to make for the wedding finished in time. I’m pretty much finished making all the mini paintings for the bridesmaid and groomsmen boxes, the earrings and keychains for them will be super quick and easy to make, I’m almost done with the signs I’ve been painting, I’m most of the way done painting my shoes, I started and almost finished a flower girl dress in one day, I’ve been finding plenty of decorations, and my friend and I started getting on a really good roll working on my wedding dress last weekend right before we had to stop so I know the progress on it is going to be much more significant and much faster when we start working on it again this weekend. And I’ve still been able to work on this website, paint a couple magnet paintings to sell, and write this blog post!
And I guess (for now) I still plan and teach art classes for a whole school, grades Kindergarten to fifth, which is year-round so we’ve already been back at school for a few weeks. Teaching is really not my main passion, though, and I really think to be content and successful teaching full-time at a public school, even for something more specific like art, teaching really needs to be your first passion in life. I can see all the work that always needs to go into teaching: planning classes, organizing classroom supplies, building relationships, managing classroom behavior, researching for lesson planning, all the meetings, all the documents and emails, showing evidence of lessons, family engagement, writing out teaching goals to show evidence of development, etc. etc. Not to mention I haven’t finished getting my teaching license yet so I still need to finish taking my own online classes and take the Praxis exams and pay more money for doing all of that if I want to keep teaching.
It just really doesn’t feel worth continuing with it, especially when I never really saw myself being a teacher when I used to think of my future career. I always knew I wanted to be an artist and I honestly thought I wouldn’t be a good teacher when I was younger and then didn’t give the idea of teaching much consideration after that. That is until after college I needed a job and I wanted it to be at least art-related and I found a job as a part-time art teacher. And I happened to actually get the job, and then students and colleagues would tell me I was great at it. And then I needed to move to a full-time job, and I applied for a job at a public school, and I happened to get it. And even though I still have students who tell me I’m their favorite teacher and they love me and I’m the best, and really nice colleagues who tell me I’m doing a good job, I just do not enjoy it at all. I feel like I almost accidentally fell into teaching, and like I’m doing it just for the pay, and teaching is definitely not that kind of job. It really does take a special kind of person to be a teacher, and I really respect and admire them for what they do, but I’m just not special in that way. I don’t have that in me. So I really hope I find a new job soon with decent enough pay.
But, until then, I’ll just keep muddling through at work and staying focused on the wedding to keep my spirits up! We have a lot of fun, exciting things going on right now so I can’t be too bummed about where I’m at. It’s just a bit weirdly stressful while I’m also still trying to have fun and enjoy everything Nick and I have going on. But working more on this website and any of my own art really helps make me feel better and a bit less stressed (even if it keeps me up too late when I have to get up really early for work). So I hope you like my quick sketch of Surreality! She was very fun to create and paint!
