I call it "Fort under siege"

Work in progress

Work in art room

Work in workplace

   Sometimes I like to transfer my more ingenious ideas onto an illustration. This time, that idea was "Woah, if there was a giant thumbtack crashing into the roof of some sort of military base, it would be a base under a tack. Heh." and then I high-fived myself.

As far as artistic ideas go, I went with one of my old classics: taking risks. Here's the thing: the extent of my reasonably realistic looking paintings before I started this project was this tree and only this tree. I daresay that by painting at all I was taking a risk. But as if that isn't risky enough to satisfy any extreme sadistic art preferences, there were also several features of the painting that were risky. For one, the shadows. It is somewhat apparent that I struggled with them. I have concluded that the best course of action regarding this is to only draw on a quantum scale, where photons can tunnel through solid objects or exist in a particle-wave duality. My next painting will be of a carbon atom; it will symbolize life. Believe it or not, I already have a series of paintings of various atoms, but they are life-sized; that's the series's gimmick, you see. Anyway, the next challenge was probably the sky, which at first I thought would be simple. It's just a sky, after all. I've painted plenty of oxygen and nitrogen atoms before. But then I decided to make it all dramatic and orange and lighting foiled me again. I eventually just covered the rather jarring transition between yellow-green and blue with smoke trails and thumbtacks, which is a sentence I say every day. It also brings me to my third challenge: smoke trails. Honestly, I don't have a good idea of what smoke trails looked like. So I just sort of went with it and they turned out wonderfully. Smoking, even. The last issue I had was time. Now, I usually take a while to make art, and I don't think there has been a project so far that I haven't taken home to finish, but this painting was quite a stretch. I probably spent at least ten hours at my house slaving over a hot palette to bring this painting into creation. I have created a term to describe the feelings this ordeal produced within me: Imagopollexaclavumophobia, or the fear of creating pictures of thumbtacks. This is quite an unfortunate condition to have, especially because I see thumbtacks when I close my eyes. Every time I blink I have a small panic attack. Was it worth it? I ask myself when as a lay in my bed with my lights on, scared I may fall asleep and have my mind synthesize monstrous images of thumbtacks within my dreams. All the things I've seen during this project, the terrors I have survived. Am I better because of it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Alas, I may never know. And as I stare at the ceiling, thinking happy thoughts to mask the evil, multicolored, and somewhat sharp parts of my mind, I understand why so many have strayed from the path of creating images of thumbtacks. It is no easy road. Also, I nearly forgot one more risk I took: this is the first painting on which I painted a fancy signature on. Cursive is hard.

And another classic I used was creating original art. One thing I like doing in my art is putting a lot of cool things in them. Sunsets are cool. Mountains are cool. Airstrikes are cool. Smoke is cool most of the time. Military bases can be cool depending on whose military they belong to. My views of the coolness of thumbtacks has been distorted by my experiences with them. So I added all of these things onto the canvas and a cool painting emerged. I know this may seem radically uncanny, but the word "composition" never entered my mind in the two or three weeks it took me to make this painting. But hey, it's original, because everybody perceives coolness differently (unless it is my painting, which is universally cool). In fact, it's the best painting of a thumbtack airstrike on a military base in snowy mountains at a sunset that I've ever seen.

The last skill I used was a new one: developing art making skills. That's right, not just any skills, but skills that make art. The skills I used most were: Fine motor skills, ocular skills (unfortunately, this one doesn't positively develop much), pun synthesis skills, paint mixing skills, paint peeling skills, paint pouring skills, paint critical thinking skills, paint analyzing skills, paint reading comprehension skills, paint writing skills, and paint application skills. Indeed, I am well prepared for my painting exam. I developed particularly the skills that involved paint. Believe it or not, I did not bother to develop these skills prior to beginning my painting, but they mostly evolved during the painting itself. At the beginning, the paint was rather clunky and difficult to use. At the end of the painting, however, when the smell of acrylic paint was embedded in my nose and my sanity was at its lowest point, I felt like a relatively masterful painter; here I was, galavanting through the fields of paint and smoke trails, spitting out unto my subjects the most beautiful thumbtack mortal eyes have ever seen. I then collapsed, twitching, as I had not eaten or slept in days. Thumbtack is love, thumbtack is life. Then I died, but life is weird like that sometimes.