Those who cannot teach...are well and truly fucked?

At my old alma mater's request. I've been running a workshop with a bunch of 19 or so undergrads. The brief was to facilitate something that could be achieved within twenty teaching hours, related to digital art, and oh, make it fun. For some reason I was repeatedly told not to get too stressed out about it, and to keep my investment fairly chilled. (What!? Me make things unnecessarily convoluted and epic? Never! How could you possibly think such a thing of me?) In light of this, much though I was tempted to give them an interactive art project (which would have possibly involved dodgy temporary software dealings and a crash course in code) or something to do with animation, but um, twenty hours said the few logical bits of brain still apparently lurking in my cranium somewhere, I decided to do two things with them, a mini-webcomic, and a blog. The webcomic because, well how can making a comic not be an awesome thing to do? Comics are amazing inter-textual pieces of art (well at least they can be). And the blog because, for an artist, a commitment to a creative journal is a good, possibly even excellent habit. A habit I'm still trying to inculcate in myself.

So far, its actually been a lot more enjoyable than I expected. Teaching is something I dread in theory, but often seem to quite enjoy in practice, its kind of a dirty little secret. I'm currently feeling quite proud of the little munchkins, some of them are doing rather interesting things for their first try. (Hopefully when they are done I can link to a few of the better ones here.) This of course has nothing to do with me. They have rather competent teachers, and seem to be a fairly self-motivated bunch in their own right, but allow me my fuzzy feelings of hubris, yes? But all this makes me return to the oft considered question, could I teach on a regular basis, or would it reduce me to a homicidal shivering wreck? (I like my alone time see.)

Ironically, the teaching does seem to provide a bit of a welcome mental relief from the looming exhibition coming up. For which all images are currently still lurking on my hard drive as a series of pixels, and have yet to manifest on the physical plane. I find this sort of thing a little nerve wracking. It isn't a big solo show, and most of the drawing is done, but things happen, files get corrupted, awful printing jobs are perpetrated, and horror of horrors, computers die. But it will all be fine, really it will...eek.

This is the upcoming exhibition of which I speak.