Being an artist isn’t really something you can turn on or off—and it’s very hard to leave your creativity behind, isn’t it?
For example, have you ever noticed a fantastic color combination somewhere and had to drop everything to go get your camera? I have.
Do you cringe at badly designed ads and shudder when you come across an early HTML website full of flashing neon colors and animated GIFs? Hopefully everyone does, actually.
For me, it goes a little deeper. I started out as a graphic designer so I’m pretty sure that’s where I get my extreme perfectionist tendencies. Some of these next ones are pretty weird, I’ll admit.
I hold paper very carefully.
Letters, flyers. . . anything I’ve just printed off.
Other people don’t ever think about how they‘re holding paper, so in general I hesitate to hand over freshly printed sheets to anyone. Most of the time they’ll just pinch it unmercifully between a thumb and all four fingers, creasing the piece of paper permanently within seconds.
How can they stand it?? There are several ways to hold paper that won’t mess it up—and yes, it might take both hands, but it’s definitely worth it.
I also don’t touch art.
It doesn’t matter if it’s hanging in a gallery or in someone’s living room; I might be looking at it from inches away but I’ll NEVER put my hands on it.
I notice people touching art all the time, which is a perfectly normal human reaction upon seeing something pretty. That makes me the abnormal one, unfortunately.
And finally:
I have an obsession with detail.
If the devil’s actually in the details, then him and I have been inseparable for years.
I’ve even started adding and removing words from my articles after uploading them so that my paragraphs begin and end perfectly aligned with the images. I also try to make sure that there are no lines of text which consist of only one word, like I’ve allowed right here.
It looks horrible, doesn’t it? Well, I promise I’ll try keep it from happening ever again.
NOTE: If you didn’t see a one-word line, then you’re not using IE or Firefox and I’m not really sure what this site looks like to you.
At least now you know about me and my artistic quirks. I’m an obsessive, detail-oriented painter and it spills over uncontrollably into my everyday life.
But all of this has made me slightly curious. (Another artistic personality trait, of course.)
What artistic quirks have you come across? Do you have any? Let me know—if I hear back from enough of you I’ll post another article with everything you come up with.