Print Difficulties.

I am an extreamly patient person when it comes to art. Which art being my major, it is a very good skill to posses. I can sit for hours on end working on a piece and not even notice. My life as of now is that of your average college art student, with late nights in the studio and more coffee than water in my blood stream. Besides God, I live for my art. These past few years I have been searching for my unique style, but for one such as myself (being superbly random and all) it is extremely difficult to stay with one.
I had print making class this morning at noon. Yes, noon is morning in college. So I go to class and of course since it is St. Patrick's day most of the students had started their drinking festivities the night before, causing attendance to suffer greatly. There was approximately 8 people out of 16 in class. The professor opts out of doing a demonstration on aquatinting and declares that it will be a work day. This caused an all around hoot of joy. Work days are golden to an art student; when you work on one piece of art in any given class for approx. 15 hours each, a 3 hour work period is heaven sent. I immediately ensue work on a freshly hardgrounded piece of metal. For Intaglio printing you take a piece of sheet metal and put a substance called o hardground n it. You then scribe thin lines in the hardground to expose metal. After all the lines are scribed you submerge the plate in acid and the exposed metal is eaten away, causing you scribed image to be indented into the surface. The metal plate is then cleaned of hardground and printed.
Today I had a fresh piece of metal, that was rather large and completely blank. To an artist, anything blank is positively exhilarating, a blank piece of paper, canvas, metal, clay... anything. So you can guess my excitement at having 3 hours to work on this blank piece of metal! I promptly plugged my ears with headphones, put on some classical piano and ensued work. I only rarely sketch ideas before putting them on a surface. I just let my brain explode onto the page. (not literally mind you) I began to sketch a horse. I scribed for about an hour and a half then took a break and then continued. By the end of class I had a completed form of a horse running majestically in the lower right corner of my metal sheet. The problem? I had 3/4 of the sheet left with nothing on it. I sat the last 15 minutes of class staring at it in despair. The high I had achieved from working was starting to ware off as I had a complete mental lapse for creativity. Do you remember taking any art classes when you had no idea what to draw or paint? You just sat there, like a lump, until the teacher came over and told you what to do. It is every artists worst nightmare. I silently prayed that the professor would venture over and assist me in my futile attempts. He eventually did and said that I eventually would figure something out. With this advise I started doing what I do best, being random! I doodled, listened to music, wrote a paragraph or two, when all of a sudden I saw a vivid image of a butterfly! So of course I immediately called the professor over and informed him that I would be filling the background with butterflies. He procured a book which contained the work of an artist named Darren Waterston. I loved his work and was ready to start up work again, but the class was over and I was due in wood-shop. I packed up and went to my next class.
I had two more studios (that equals 6 hours) before I could go back to my room. The whole time I thought of the print. I was tortured by the unfinished etching I carried with me the rest of the day. By the time I reached my room I was so bursting with ideas that I felt slightly nauseous.
Needless to say I spent the rest of the night scribing, at least until I needed to write and thus I started this blog.
I hope that tomorrow will be slightly less agonizing.