2 My First Published Image

I am 17 years old. My jeans are rolled up around my ankles and my forehead is greasy with sweat. My glasses are round and huge on my face.

I am in the computer lab adjacent to the high school newspaper offices. The fluorescent lights blaze into my eyes as I look up. There is no escaping this task.

I am sitting at the computer with one of our advisors leaning over my shoulder.

I am creating an image of our new principal for the cover of the next issue of the school newspaper. He’s the ultimate image of a functional high school principal. No one here has met him yet, and we don’t want to just use his rather bland picture.

My advisor’s breath is coffee-filled and it’s hot on my neck. The computer screen fills my vision, we have a black and white photo of our principal, but it’s not quite right.

I am contemplating how to make this picture represent our new principal faithfully, but also how to make it more interesting. We want art. My advisor doesn’t say those words, but I know that he is thinking them.

But I’m a kid, I think back to him, but don’t say. What do any of us know about making art with a computer?  I actually think I could do a decent job of drawing him, but we don’t have that kind of time.

I hope we have a breakthrough soon, I’m exhausted and frustrated that we’re not done yet. The finished image needs to go to the printer with all of our articles.

The rest of the newspaper staff are around us, not really staring at me, but fully interested in what we’re doing. This is the last thing we have to do before publication.

My advisor is a kindly gentleman, partially bald, and ever understanding, who is pressing down on me like ten tons of creative encouragement.

“What else can we try?” he says as he puts his hand on the desk next to the keyboard. I wonder briefly if he’s going to grab the mouse and try something, but he doesn’t.

I want to give up. I feel like we’ve done enough, like we’re pushing the technology to its limits. I am sitting at a Mac Classic, one of ten in our high school and we’ve been here since the dinosaurs.

But I move the mouse, click a few times and apply another filter, pushing the gain, and therefore the grain up a lot. The computer redraws the image from the top down and someone behind me sighs at the time it takes.

Mr Krill murmurs something vaguely encouraging, happy that I am trying at all. He knows that he doesn’t understand how to do this stuff yet.

The screen flickers, the computer hums and the image before us slowly shifts.

I feel like a flower pressed into a rather large book, there’s so much pressure now, I’m having trouble breathing or thinking, stuck between these pages.

I remember the new image being revealed and us both inhaling sharply. Something had changed, we had created something new, something that might be good. Would it be enough to get him to back off? I had no way of knowing at the time.

That constant pressure, the pushing, the shoving, moved me to try and try and give it one more creative twist. Click, hum, shift. Something happens, the image improves. I think it actually looks cool.

I lift my hand from the mouse, slide back the chair and smile widely.

“What about this?” I ask somewhat sheepishly to my advisor. He nods at me with a smile.

This push, this pressure will lead me into the visual arts, I will go to college, move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film because of this image. I will follow my passion for creating images that tell stories across the country, and I will teach others how to keep pushing too.

Our other advisor, a spindly older woman who has been impatiently waiting for us to finish, walks over and looks at the screen. “Yes, yes. This is splendid, congratulations you two.”

She takes the mouse and saves the file to the disk and pops it out of the computer. She slides it gently into the large portfolio that we use to transport everything across town.

“Let’s get this to the printer.”