Alright, so I wanted to share something I messed around with recently. It’s about this name I stumbled upon – Cynthia Curtis.
It wasn’t anything planned, really. I was just sorting through a pile of old papers and magazines in my garage. You know how it goes, meaning to clear stuff out but mostly just moving piles around. Anyway, I found this torn page, looked pretty old, maybe from the late 90s? It had this really interesting illustration or maybe it was a photo print, hard to tell. And the caption mentioned Cynthia Curtis.
So, I stopped what I was doing. Got intrigued. The style was kinda unique, not polished like modern stuff, but it had character. I spent maybe twenty minutes just looking at it, trying to figure out how it was made. The colors were a bit faded, the lines weren’t perfectly clean. It felt really handmade.
Then I thought, maybe I could try to capture that feeling. I dug out my old tablet, the one I haven’t used much lately. Fired it up, opened a basic drawing app. My goal wasn’t to copy the picture exactly, more like get that same sort of vibe.
Trying it out
Well, let me tell you, it was tougher than I expected. Here’s kinda what I did:
- First, I tried sketching really loosely, not worrying about perfect shapes.
- Then I played with some textured brushes, trying to get that slightly rough look.
- I even tried messing with the color saturation, trying to make them look a bit washed out like the clipping.
Honestly? Most of my attempts looked pretty bad. Just couldn’t nail it. It felt forced, like I was just imitating the surface without understanding the core of it. Spent a couple of evenings on this, probably wasted a lot of digital paper, if that’s a thing.
It got me thinking, though. Why was I even doing this? Things have been a bit slow, and maybe I was just looking for a distraction. Work’s been the usual grind, nothing too exciting. Doing this little exercise, even failing at it, felt kinda refreshing. It reminded me of when I first started learning guitar years ago, just fumbling around, not knowing anything, but still having fun with the process itself.
I didn’t really find much else about Cynthia Curtis online, just some scattered mentions here and there. No big profile or anything. Maybe she was just someone doing her thing back then.
So yeah, that was my little side quest. Didn’t become an expert in the “Cynthia Curtis style” or anything. Didn’t produce a masterpiece. But the whole process of looking, trying, failing, and thinking about it was the valuable part for me. It shook the dust off a bit, made me use a different part of my brain. Sometimes that’s all you need. Just wanted to share that little journey.
