HIGH SCHOOL ILLUSTRATION part 2

This was another drawing from high school art class days. She is the lovely wife of the guy in the last post. Tomorrow I will reveal the drawing I did of their child.


These drawings bring back a lot of art class fire memories. One day I was trying to light the torch to melt some silver so I could cast jewelry.

This torch had one gas hose and one air hose. I never could remember which one I was supposed to turn on 1st, but I knew the order was really important. I figured I'd try one way and if that didn't work I'd do it the other way. Looking back on it all, it seems extremely risky to hand a torch over to an unsupervised kid. I didn't even have any safety goggles.

There were 2 or 3 torch work stations lined up against the windows. The windows were covered by large 3'x4' industrial plastic-coated canvas curtains. I remember turning on the gas and grabing one of those spark-maker things. I tried and tried to get a spark to come out of that thing but it was old and worn out. Meanwhile the gas was freely flowing out of the torch nozzle. I found another sparker tool and squeezed it, and CHA-WHOOOOMBA!!!

I created a blue fireball which hung in the air for a very long time. It seems like it should have just flashed and been over within a moment, but it hung around. It floated up slowly about the speed of a helium balloon. At this point I decided it would be wise to shut off the gas.

I remember the fire ball flattened out into a vertical sheet of blue flame and clung to the curtain like static. The blue flame wasn't burning into the curtain; it was clinging to every inch of it, so there was a large curtain of blue fire on the wall of the classroom. I along with several other kids in the classroom sat and stared at it. It was such a strange and hypnotizing sight to see. No one talked or did anything, we just calmly watched it.

Then starting at the bottom the fire fizzled out, and then the fizzle-out slowly traveled up the curtain like a wick burning out, and finally last upper strip of flame made a FOOMP-sound and it was all gone.

There was a sort of smoky char on the curtain but it wasn't too bad. I don't think my teacher ever knew about it.