Virginia Tech- Part II

My heart truly goes out to the Virginia Tech community.  This school, already known for the shooting back in 2007 (where 32 people were killed and 25 others were injured), is facing yet another terrible crisis. Though the shooter was not a student at Virginia Tech (he was actually a student at Radford University), a VT police officer was killed and the shootings occurred on campus.

One of my roommates works for admissions at Hofstra, and she mentioned the other day that the admissions office at VT must be a hellhole after the second shooting incident.  And she's totally right.  How is Virginia Tech going to convince incoming freshmen and other high schoolers looking at colleges that it is, in fact, a safe campus?

For one, they will have to really talk up their campus-alert system that was put into effect after the first incident in 2007.  This security system prevented any other killings by alerting the entire campus that a shooter was on the loose.

I don't necessarily think that Virginia Tech's reputation is ruined.  It's just extremely unfortunate that they've had to deal with two shootings in the past five years.  If they can control their press mentions and get the story to include the positive details about the school, then they can certainly get back on track.

NFL Concussion Catastrophe

Colt McCoy, rookie quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, really got rocked last night when he received a helmet-to-helmet hit from Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison.

I mean, wow.  That makes me cringe up every time I rewind it.  But get this: McCoy gets back in the game just 2 plays later.
Is anyone else a little skeptical about this?  The kid falls to the ground rigid, rolling around in obvious pain (cranial pain, I might add), and he's up and ready to get back in the game in 3 minutes?
I guess I wasn't the only one, since McCoy's dad is the one hitting the media, claiming that the Browns didn't perform a concussion test on his son even though the signs were obvious.  After the game, McCoy told reporters that he couldn't remember the hit, and that the bright lights of their cameras were bothering him.

Um, helloOoOo?  I haven't even been passed a CPR test and it seems like I could've done a lot more for poor Colt than his highly-trained-and-certified athletic staff.

The Browns better get on this quick and reassure their fans that they do, in fact, care about their players' health and not just their athletic ability.  Otherwise, they could face not only NFL investigation into their care and treatment, but those tragic Clevelandites may just decide to side with a player instead of the team.

American Airlines

American Airlines is on a whoooole other level right now.  We all know by now that American kicked Alec Baldwin off a flight for playing "Words with Friends" on his iPad.  I've heard both sides of the story, reading Alec's so-called "apology" on Huffington Post and also reading American's version.  But, honestly, no matter what American does from here on out, they will be known as  the airline that kicked Alec Baldwin off its flight.  That's because they weren't the first ones to come out with the story, and the first story is the only one that matters.  They should've known that the story would get out, and instead of being proactive about it and making a statement, they let Alec Baldwin take over the Twitter world and really get the story going.

American, let's hope Tyler Perry can fix you up...

PR Invasion

Okay, so I have to make some blog posts for my public relations class.  I thought I was fulfilling this requirement by just having a blog, but I guess not.  So for those of you who actually read this, just ignore the next few posts.

 Just keep scrolling til you see some more pictures.

Sigh

Okay, so.  I've been M.I.A.  I know.  What can I say?  I've been super busy watching TV.  Also, I went home for Thanksgiving, which was awesome.  So, those are my excuses.

In Painting class, I've finished the still life.  It turned out pretty well, I think.  Take a look at the finished product.

I changed a few things around, some colors, and fixed the flowers and leaves.  Overall, I'm happy with it.  Some things could be different, but I'm content.

Our next and final painting to do is actually two paintings.  Two small little canvases, using the same composition, but having to paint them completely opposite.  Meaning different colors, different thickness, different texture, different EVERYTHING.  It's actually a lot harder than it sounds.
I chose a picture of an orchid I found.  I made the first painting basically just the same as the picture.

I think it's pretty, right?  I like to think so.  I really like it, anyway.  So, how do I make it the opposite?  At first I was going to just use complimentary colors, but then I realized that the next painting would still just be red and green.  So I decided to use different colors.  I decided to make the flower blue, but go reverse as to how it's laid out in the first one.  Meaning, where it's white in the above painting, it would be the darkest blue in the second painting.  And where it's a dark red, that part will be white.  I also decided not to blend the shades as much, and instead leave them stripe-y.  And the edges will be blurred with the background.  So, here's what I've got so far:

In the background, I am going to make some kind of multi-colored pattern, or something.  I don't really know yet.  I am TOTALLY up for suggestions...but this is due tomorrow.  Yikes!  Maybe I can get him to extend it til the final next week.

On to drawing.  

After the whole skeletal disaster, we moved onto ink.  At first, the ink gave me a lot of trouble.  It's hard to control, it's hard to get the shade right, and you can't erase or fix anything at all.  When it's on there, it's permanent.  For the assignment we had to do a landscape.  A quick Google search and I found a simple enough picture to copy.  So here is my ink copy:

At first, I didn't really like it.  Well, scratch that.  I didn't dislike it, but I wasn't crazy about it either.  We all hung our pictures on the wall, took a good look, and after a few minutes the professor asked "Which ones stand out to you?"  And the first one pointed out was mine!  By like, 5 people!  I was floored.  Even the professor after class was like, "Hey, how about that, people actually liked your drawing for once!"  Yeah, thanks jackass.

These were a couple other ones I really liked.  Specifically the forest one.

Today we started our last new thing, and I was sooo nervous about it.  We started doing figure drawing today.  As in the human figure.  As in the naked human figure.  We did a man today, and we're doing a woman on Thursday (that's what she said).  More on this later.  For now all I'll say is, it's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

In 3D Design, I just finished my work on the roses.  When we last left off, I had finished the roses and the vase with the foam board.  I had to decide if I wanted to paint the roses, the vase, both, or neither.  My issue with painting the roses is that, because they were so tightly wound and had the hot glue already, it would be tricky if not impossible to make it not look messy.  But then I had this idea about Alice in Wonderland, and the whole "Painting the Roses Red" scene...

So after that I just had this whole vision of the roses being white but painted red, and they're sitting on a vase in the Queen of Hearts's castle but she doesn't even notice...okay, well, now I'm off in my own little world.  But you get the idea, I hope.
Basically what all this means is that I painted the roses red, but you can tell that they've been painted.  Here's the finished result:

Everyone was really impressed by the vase because it's hard to cut foam board so cleanly and neatly.  Overall, I'm really happy with how this project turned out for me.


The last thing is ceramics.  I don't ever have any pictures from this class, which you can all thank me for later because it's never anything good that comes out of there.  Once I get a few pics, I'll be able to explain the project.


Ok.  Wow.  What an update, right?  All I have to say is, thank GOD the semester's almost over.  And then what?  I'll have all this leftover art supplies, like paint...and charcoal...and a wooden smoothing tool.  What am I going to do with all of this crap?

I'm all caught up in my classes!  Even ahead in some.  I think I'm starting to do well in painting, while I seem to be getting worse in drawing.  Ceramics I'm starting to like more, too, even though it is soo super messy.

Painting:  The still life is nearly done, I just have to do some cleaning up and touching up this weekend.  This is the scene we had to work with:

I cut it down a bit, and the professor said we can mess with the colors and even make up the shadows.  My view is slightly different because I stood farther back.  But this is what I've worked on so far:

So, obviously I changed the colors.  But I'm really happy with how the pots turned out.  The shading is pretty good, I think.  I have worked on it since I took the picture, but nothing big has changed.  I'm still working on the flowers and the bottle.  Hopefully I can get another A on this and finish strong.

Drawing: We spent so much time drawing skeletons and bones, and I absolutely hated it.  There was just something about it that I couldn't get, and no matter how much I tried I couldn't get it down.  These are the best ones I ended up with.

And everyone else did sooo well.  Again, I felt like crap in this class.  I've started to really hate it and dread going in the morning.  

We just started on working with ink, so we'll see how that goes.

Ceramics:  I've finished my big piece that I was working on.  All set to be fired, and then I'll glaze it.  Here's how it turned out.

I still don't really like the supports, but I tried to take them out and it nearly collapsed on me.  It was a bitch trying to put them back in, but it turned out alright.  I think it was pretty successful.  I put some slip paint on it before it gets fired, so then the glaze I put on will turn out in different colors.

Speaking of glaze, I finally glazed a piece and got it fired.  Remember one of the original pieces, the manipulated slab?  Well, I dipped it in a really cool blueish green glaze.

 

It's kind of metallic-looking, and pretty cool if I do say so myself.  You can see in the second picture that it must've gotten stuck to or burned by something in the kiln.  Geez.  Thanks, professor!

3D Design: Today in class I made a vase for the flowers.  It took a lot longer than I planned because the first one I made was terrible.  So I made it a simpler design, and it looks much better.

The reason it took so long is because of the side.  I had to cut out a strip, then score, break, bend, and fold every half inch so it could twist on the sides.

     


But basically the whole point of this is, I'm all caught up in everything!  Hmm, I feel like I should find some wood to knock on or something.

Playing Catch Up

Well, now that my field hockey career is completely over, it's time to refocus on my classes and catching up on my work.  I've basically missed the past two weeks of class because of traveling and away games, so this week I was really swamped.

It's been especially annoying for my 3D Design class because it's only on Fridays, so I have missed the past 8 hours of class and was soooo far behind.  Or so I thought.

I go into class yesterday and find out that last week apparently only 4 people showed up for class, and two people were still working on the first project that I thought was finished 3 weeks ago.  Guess I'm not so far behind.

The professor for 3D design is really nice, and really laid back.  And I think that's part of the problem.  There's no real due dates or class structure.  The class is supposed to run from 9am-12:40pm.  But people just come in at random times and leave whenever they feel like it.  I feel like I'm in one of those high schools where you sit on bean bags outside and the teachers are former hippies who still smoke weed.

So, due to this structureless class and people not doing their work, turns out I was able to catch up and actually get ahead of most people in one class.  Heck yes.

The newest project is basically just creating a mold or form out of foam board that contains 3 separate parts and not using right angles.  Kind of the opposite of our previous 17-sided figure using only right angles.  So I got this idea to do one of my favorite craft projects, making a rose.

I used this little DIY Instruction webpage, and created the spiral on the foam board.  Then I had to kind of break up the foam in the board so I could spin it all together.  And it worked!  And turned out really well!  I had to use hot glue in order to keep it together without unravelling.

I made three roses, and then hot glued them to wire rods.  I had the choice between the wire rods and wooden sticks, but the wire moves better and makes it more visually dynamic.

Whoa.  Visually dynamic?  Guess the art-minor in me is really coming out.

Yep, another mobile upload.