Aquarium Visit #1

Watercolor fish sketches in an aquarium. It sounds like a good idea. Until you figure out that the halls are dimly lit so that the children can scream "I SEE NEMO!" because they have a better chance of seeing fish with the tank being lit.

So when all the colors look like they're mud, I was working with basically no light.

Fish and some abstract... underwater.... coral? rock? background?

   

I think I've done it.

One of the biggest things for next semester is tackling this procrastination.
I believe this will start with a better dish-washing routine.

Right now, my turntable for 3D modeling is rendering. It's rendering very quickly, actually. I may have done something wrong. I learned how to render animations 3 hours ago. I'll post the turntable when I'm done. Tomorrow, maybe. And I want to post my animation, even though I'm not proud of it. I should be, but I'm not.

Just keep playing that calm music and breathe and it'll be over soon.

a long, abusive day

This is a post that shall serve me later in life.
Today was my first set of real finals. Or, more aptly, almost-finals. Today I showed work, almost complete, not complete enough.
Today I saw what I should have done two or three weekends ago.

I almost choked up with the pressure and the futility, but then I just became... It's a fight. You fight until the very end not to choke, not to twitch or fidget or jitter, and you laugh at whatever small joke you can, but you know that the judgement in the room is a blanket over the community that we try to create as people of the same major.

and then my half-finished animation was shown.
It's like reading aloud a rough draft of an essay in front of a class, not just handing it in.


and in the end I just mentally moved on to the next impossible challenge, an art history exam.

and in two days I have everything due.

and could I ever be friends with these people? I see them. I see their biting remarks and weaknesses, they all have different ticks and problems and unresolved issues. We all come out in the art (even though we hide it). It feels as if all of the niches have been filled in these social groups/cliques around me.

It isn't futile. It's just difficult. And I always feel that I can work harder, but lately I've been reaching the 'Screw it' point. It's at night, when you just have no will to move on. My most recent one was at 530am, after some sleep, when I thought to myself, I will not be able to finish this animation even if I worked very hard right now for four hours. And I went back to sleep for an hour.

What have I learned this semester? I've learned beginnings, and they are always the hardest part.
Later, I'm sure, I'll have my lists of things to do next semester.

Aster

This is a rather poor aster, but the idea is fine. And from a distance, it isn't that bad >_<.
I ma try to add a second bump to the middle so that it's not so.. glow-y.

Next is a snowdrop. Then, sleep.

Morning Bird gets things done

This is what I did this morning, before noon.

A rose, still in production, but looking decent. And a checkerboard next to it.

A poppy and poppy-bud, with simple color. I put it in the vase. The vase is supposed to have water in it, but I don't quite understand how to do that with the refractions/reflections. So I just duplicated the vase, cut off the top, colored it black, upped the transparency, made it smaller, and put it inside. And I don't know what's up with the wood texture, but it's trolling me. 2 lights +reflection in the table.

Second go, changed the second light to a nice pink (and its shadow to green). The black background is unsettling.

I need to make more flowers. *bane of my life.*

I've been thinking flowers, maybe daisies, to brighten up the room...

NURBS petals (altered planes) and a polygon sphere (smoothed temorarily). Temporary color, too. On the way to a bouquet!
I need to find out how many petals daisies actually have. Wiki says ~20. 18 it is.

3D Modeling final

And this is the first drawing for my Maya modeling final. It will contain birth flowers, from each month, coming together in a bouquet. The flowers together in one place is impossible because of different growing seasons, but they come together to make a year. At the same time, they are fragile and delicate and are constantly in a state of decay. The vase sort of represents the world that contains this metaphor for time.

I think of this piece as a painting. I'll design how I create the petals/leaves first- what shapes I'll use and how I'll make a lot then tweak them to make each petal a little different.

HAPPY NOVEMBER

So this is what I did in class today. I R photoshop genius! Not really, but this is my first attempt at coloring. I even used different layers. Why didn't I do this in high school? These are characters for my Animation I final. And there isn't even any purple.

my midterm is due on thursday

I won't freak out, I'll just sleep less.
It's a profile self-portrait map, with the top lip, nostril, and eye indented as lakes/inlets. I still need to finish the coastline and mountains and make a wall for the hairline, and I need to find a place for the castle.

At this moment, I'm in a dark computer lab, on a mac, pretending to do my modeling homework. We use Maya 2012 and I must complete a science fiction lab by tuesday. I also have 2 small stopmotion projects, and at least 40 pages of reading.

I also stayed up till 4am last night. 4am is the morning. I don't like it. When I stay up at night, I feel like the sun won't come up in the morning.

It's not that much work. Or, I feel like it should be more. Or, I can sequence time and plan more effectively. I don't know. Next semester will be more, I hope. The best days are when I don't have 5 minutes to breathe, I have everything done and I get things done, and I come back to my room still energized after 9 hours of classes.

thus, school starts again

First day of classes, 3rd semester.

Some teaches faster than others. They teach fast, I mean. My classes are falling into two categories:
1. It's what you make of it.
2. Work hard, follow assignments, do well.

So out of this year, I need to make sure I get the most out of everything. And a sketchbook. I need to draw more.

Daily Practice discoveries

I'm up to daily self-portrait 85 or so, and I haven't been posting them because I've been home all summer without a scanner. But I wanted to take some pictures and post some of the drawings that are in a style I'm beginning to see more of. It's made of straight lines and curves, and is very very geometric. I want to see how they translate into more three-dimentional drawings, but I like them so far.
#41 Lizy-Doll, #55 Bthing Suit Try-On, #77 Geometry trying to be more interesting, #79 Sitting on my hands, #80 Happy July 4th! (fireworks are scary)

Emotionally, most of these faces are hiding for one reason or another.


 

I can change I can change I can change I can change

Women, do we marry our fathers and become our grandmothers? Do we end up living the same lives as everyone who came before us? Do we inherit our anxieties and pessimisms, fighting them back with diagnoses? That's pessimistic.

The housepainting project included a wall behind a very heavy breakfront, filled with the Nice Stuff. My mother explained where each piece came from. My great-grandmother's plates, made in England. An important Italian trinket given out as a wedding reception gift. Glass from Corning Glass Factory. A rock painted gold.

I got to go to a hardware store today. I just felt this overwhelming rush of potential. Each thing can be used to make something.

It's starting to get late. I wanted to read before I fell asleep from exhaustion. But a week of painting and reorganizing and changing furniture hasn't slowed my pancake quest.

I hope anyone's reading this. I think I'm just writing them to keep up with writing (I haven't even written a dream-record in at least a month) and keep a record for myself.

Keeping Busy.

It's been weeks, and everything is still a mess, except, for some reason, my head. One month till my birthday, another and I'm at school. I'm keeping busy:

Gardening. I borrowed a rototiller and cleaned up a plot in the backyard. It's midway through June, but mom already bought the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I even consulted my books (what's the point of having them if you don't read them?) to get the spacing and planting right. I love the work. I hope that some day I'll grow my own vegetables.

Painting. I have the paint, I haven't painted my room yet.

Cooking. I'm trying to make the core recipes for next year, make sure I can make real healthy food in a short amount of time with a few ingredients- how much can I do with flour, eggs, butter, sugar? Would it be cheaper to bake my own bread?

Asking Questions. I want to know how businesses and politics work. I love learning about it. What laws govern businesses and religion and politicians and real estate and how they are interpretted. I've become increasingly interested in corruption and I want to be able to understand the economy better than an art student stereotype. I want to have intelligent conversations with people. I'm also preparing myself for the upcoming presidential election.

So, tomorrow, I'll wake up early and make french toast ravioli.
http://www.newlyweds-blog.com/2010/09/23/stuffed-french-toast/.
I probably don't have ricotta, but I'm thinking of putting something else in there, like eggs or PANCAKE BATTER. Pancake in french toast. THIS is what summer is about.

The third: What I learned in college. Year 1.

Time is fluid. I often had many projects to work on for a week, and I had to figure out when I would do them, and fit this around constants. I have a painting due in a week and I'm not doing anything Monday night so I can get it done then but the homework for Wednesday needs to get done Tuesday morning so that I have time Tuesday evening to do Friday's homework. After weeks and weeks of thinking like this, I don't think in any other way.

High school did not prepare me for this time scheduling because if we had homework, it was probably due the next day. I think this forces procrastination. I think this evolution of thinking about time happened when I realized that if I get something done sooner, I don't worry about it.

I realized that as much as I dreaded my drawing class, Professor taught us how to think about the process of the drawing. It wasn't about pencil control or shapes, but about how to see the human figure from the inside out. We break down the human figure into the gesture and then simple shapes.

I learned:
How different kinds of light create color,
how to mix acrylic and oil paint,
how to create any color with the primary colors and white,
how to see color and shadow,
how to make a design interesting,
how to paint from a still life,
how to arrange a still life,
how to use InDesign, Illustrator, FinalCutPro,
how to generally use a Mac
how to mount anything on nice paper,
how to conceptualize a plan into a 3-dimentional shape,
how to cut and rip paper in a straight line,
how to quickly pack,
a decent amount of pre-1800s art history

and I don't know what else. There's a lot that's not in there.

Art.

LCD is over, so here is some of the larger pieces of art that didn't fit in the scanner. They're all huge files, and photoshop'd the same way- re-sized, cropped, and making the lights lighter and the darks darker (but not a contrast difference).
1. I think it was a self-portrait at one point, but this is the luminosity painting I did over winter break. Acrylic on Cardboard.
2. the third of the 3d glasses set, this is somewhat cubist. Charcoal and Newspaper.
3. Abstract cubist luminosity/chiaroscuro painting. Acrylic.
4. Foreground, middleground, background exercise, with normal, faux, and sfumato color palettes. Color-aid.

on spirituality, nature/art, crossword discipline, being straightedge

It's Ash Wednesday, when Christians burn last year's Palm Sunday palms and draw a cross on your forehead. And now, I'm sitting in the computer lab wondering if my appearance is being disregarded, considered, or remembered. But at the same time, I'm trying really hard not to have an itch on my brow. I'm not particularly religious. But I think it's important, and there are times when you're walking on a trail and the trees move in a pattern and the grass smells just right and it's a special moment of beauty. That's holy.

Spring break is next week, and I don't really have anything to do for a week, which is a pity. So I wanted to drive to Sand's Point and draw something. I should paint something. The least I can do is bring a watercolor set and get basic line and color down. I just need to do art over break, draw a landscape from life.

Crosswords are like hitting a brick every day. Sometimes you break it, sometimes you know how to break it, sometimes you just can't get a handle on it. But there's always a new brick every day.

I describe myself as 'straightedge', but I don't... there are people who.... there are things that just don't interest me, and they tend to be on the same plane of thought, even though common morals of society give them different values. Like, I don't smoke and my ears aren't pierced. I don't hate people who do things, illegal or not, but as long as they respect my decisions, I can usually respect theirs. If they're not killing themselves slowly.

I love the way people walk. Toes facing inwards, outwards, wide at the knees, one knee a little twisted. It's wonderful.

cuts

I am cut up. I have cuts all over my fingers from a hard candy experiment (very hand candy), in places where the band-aids don't stay on for long. There's a pimple-turned-cut at the corner of my mouth, which will never heal because it is constantly reopened. My fingers have paint on them, which needs cleaning. My nails are, for once in my life, consistently longer than my personal average, and 8 1/2 of them are painted purple (aforementioned band-aid attempts). The worst of them, I believe, is a 1/2 inch cut that is not artery-deep, but reopens uncomfortably at the bend of a finger.

I think the worst part of this physical affliction is that it will all heal, with time. And other things will eventually take their place.



In an unrelated event, I got netflix, and started watching Firefly. And then I found out that there were only 14 episodes, and I was very sad.

long writing, music

I keep discovering albums on my ipod, thanks to friends who give me tons of music that I never get around to. So, I've been listening to Love Below, Outkast, and Welcome Interstate Managers, Fountains of Wayne. Yes, the Stacy's Mom band. The atmosphere of 'sad NY office worker needs a drink but knows it's bad for him' is like a different face of Jonathon Coulton's 'sad office worker is too busy dreaming to have any relationships'. This is also contrasted with the Decemberists's 'Victorian peasant is sad, has a sad life, and drowns after falling in love'. I love this, it feels so unabashedly bias and incorrect.

Today was the DDA meeting for the freshman in my department. We are 2D/3D animation and 'interactive arts', which I don't understand but it sounds really interesting and important. The head of the department gave us an overview of the next 3 years of our lives. I can't wait. It's going to be so much better than this year's mess.

So, that leaves me with the summer. There are so many things I want to do, many things I should do, and so many options. I know, though, that I need to redo my room. It hasn't changed much since the beginning of middle school, and now that I don't live there, it'll mostly be storage for art supplies and a studio. With a bed. And a large desk in the middle of the room, with a great studded-leather chair, a bust of Julius Ceasar that tilts backwards to reveal a secret room behind a bookcase. At the very least, a desk with storage space, and a set of bookshelves in the hallway (to replace the sideways one and clear up my room).

Some LCD work

These are all from the last 3 weeks, selected works. Oil paint, unless otherwise noted. We did Chiaroscoro, Cangiantismo, and Sfumato in the same month. Chiaroscoro bottles from life, Cangiantismo indoor/outdoor scenery, and Sfumato self-portraits.
Okay. Chiaroscuro: bottles, abstract with same palate. Cangiantismo: stained glass flower design (gouache on paper, then cut and pasted), indoor/outdoor painting. Sfumato self-portrait in a grid. And last is the case I made, so that I can carry wet oil paintings from my class to my room without getting everything ruined. It's made of a Crispix box, corrugated and pressed cardboard, duct tape, rubber cement, and masking tape. It can hold six 11" x 9" pieces.