Not every artist begins with pencils or paint; Noble De Marco ’26 started with fish. “About 200 of them,” he told me, casually, like this was some typical origin story. Long before painting still life scenes or pulling his one and only all-nighter in Old Tarble, he was quietly populating an online ocean.
“I was really bored one day,” he explained, “and then I found this computer game. You’d play as a fish and you’d eat other fish to eventually get larger and then become a shark.” The fish in question were rounded rectangles with various stripes and shapes stacked together, which, for Noble, wasn’t character design so much as his own opportunity to tinker. He opened paint.net, “kind of like if Google Slides met Photoshop,” as he put it, and began creating his own aquatic animals. “I would just find a fish and be like, ‘Oh, that one looks cool. I’ll try and recreate that.” What might look on the surface like an oddly specific side quest actually hints at a deeper current in how Noble thinks: give him something to work with, like a set of shapes, a handful of rectangles, and he’ll spend hours figuring out how far they can go.
That instinct didn’t come from art class. In middle school, Noble’s assignments seemed more like strange engineering dares than invitations to make art: designing a cardboard box with a ping-pong ball trapped inside, or bending metal wire into the shape of an alligator to represent a randomly assigned “virtue.” “It just felt like a lot of steps to do something,” he frowned. “I just didn’t vibe with it.” Things shifted in high school for Noble when he landed in the classroom of an art teacher with decades of experience. “We went back to the basics of how to draw,” Noble recalled: “different types of pencils, or different mediums, charcoal, egg tempera, and then eventually oil.” The projects stopped feeling like arbitrary tasks and more like a set of problems that could actually be worked through.
Even now, he reaches for that framing. When Noble talks about making art, he rarely uses the usual language of “expression” first. Instead, he describes it as thinking through paint. “It kind of felt like a puzzle, almost,” he said, thinking back to an earlier painting. “Which parts should I do first or second? How will I create this color? I have the idea of the color I want on the canvas, but what can I do to create that color and give a certain amount of depth?” The idea usually arrives unannounced, “it comes out of nowhere,” he notes, but once it lands, the making steadies. He nudges forms into place, tries colors on, and lets the painting slowly become itself. It isn’t emotion-first so much as inquiry-first: feeling arrives as a byproduct of figuring something out.
When I joked that his process reminded me of those choose-your-own-adventure books, Noble grinned. “That’s kind of how I make things,” he said. He jumps between sections of a painting, following whatever part calls loudest, accepting that coherence emerges from motion rather than a concrete plan. Each brushstroke, each layer in paint.net, is like another page turn: a small decision that shifts where the painting is headed.
For someone who sees painting as a puzzle, Noble is pretty relaxed even when the pieces don’t fit. He prefers forgiving mediums: oil paint that wipes away, or digital layers that disappear with a keystroke. If watercolor muddies, instead of restarting, he simply shifts the piece toward it. “Let’s see how that goes,” he shrugged. When I brought up Bob Ross, he laughed and admitted the influence: “I kind of just roll with the mistakes, like what Bob Ross said: ‘Happy little accidents.’” For Noble, mistakes aren’t the end of the puzzle; they just change what the finished picture is allowed to look like.
For someone who has pulled an all-nighter on a painting and casually drawn hundreds of digital fish, Noble is pretty candid about how hard it can be to begin. “I don’t make as much art as I’d like to,” he admitted. “Sometimes it just feels difficult to pick up a pencil.” The want is there, but it often waits for a reason: a syllabus, a deadline, a grade. “Most of my artworks have come from needing to do it for a class,” he admits. The fish era was different; no one was scoring his rounded rectangles. Now, free time can feel more paralyzing than open. When he hits an art block, he doesn’t grit through it. “I think the easiest thing to do is just to step back,” he told me. “When I try and push through it, most of the time I’m just not liking how this is going.” Maybe that’s less a personal quirk but more so a familiar sentiment on campus, where creating usually feels justified only when it counts for something. Which is why I kept imagining his earlier fishes drifting somewhere in a digital ocean, unmeasured and unbothered, making themselves for no one.
What struck me the most while talking with Noble was the way our minds seem to orbit the same question, but from opposite directions. He gets energized by the mechanics of translation: how to take something he sees in his head and reverse-engineer it into paint, even if that means inventing the steps as he goes. Tutorials don’t interest him as much. “I really like the idea of trying to figure stuff out myself,” he said. Bob Ross may be a cultural touchstone, but Noble would rather “do things more organically” than follow a recipe. I tend to be the opposite: I like scaffolding. Instructions offer a floor I can stand on before I start bending rules. Noble told me he admired my “precision and line work,” and the way I align neutrals — colors he usually doesn’t reach for. In his world, color operates more like a lever; complementary pairs and saturated hues are what he called “cheat sheets to making really eye-catching stuff.” Talking with him made the contrast clearer: we’re solving similar puzzles, but while he grabs the pieces and starts building, I like to know how best the picture on the box comes together.
Despite the occasional block, Noble isn’t worried about running out of ideas. “I don’t think [creativity] is a finite resource,” he said. “There are just so many things out there to inspire you.” Friends who compose music, artists he follows online, paintings he sees in class — all of it becomes material, not to copy but to inspire something of his own. That stance lands differently in a period where artificial intelligence tools promise to automate imagination. “I think the world could definitely use more creative people,” he said. “Being able to continue to exercise creativity in spite of tools that seem like they can do it for you is a good thing.” It’s not that an algorithm couldn’t spit out a fish, or a dorm room, or perfect color harmony. It’s that it wouldn’t arrive there the way he does: slowly, insistently, treating each new piece as a puzzle worth sitting with. The work, for Noble, begins wherever he is willing to start: sometimes with a rectangle, sometimes with a half-formed idea, sometimes with nothing at all. Maybe that’s all creativity asks for: just the nerve to start.
