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?

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.

3D Design- Getting Plastered

My 3D Design class only meets once a week, on Fridays from 9AM-12:40PM.  Yeah, that's a long class.  But it ends up working out fine because I get soo much done in class.  I'm missing class this week (because, once again, we'll be in Virginia, taking on ODU...you get the idea), so I had to go into the workshop today to get some things done.

Our first project for this class was to create a 17-sided figure with all planes being parallel or perpendicular and using right angles only.  We had a cube of clay to start with, and this is what I came up with:

My professor somehow counted out 17 sides to this thing.  I don't know if it really is, but whatever.  If it works for him, it works for me.

The next step was to create a larger model of the figure using foam board and duct tape.  We had to measure all the sides and multiply them to make it on a larger scale.  So here's the outcome:

This thing gave me hell.  I didn't have an Exacto knife with me, so I was bumming off of the girl next to me.  Only hers was duller than Ben Stein, so my cutting was all whacked.  Plus, trying to make a small cube to tape to the inside of a bigger cube so as to create that hole in the side of the wall was brutal.

As you can see, I've already moved onto the next step, which is cutting a hole out and filling the hollow foam piece with plaster.

It's a messy business.

This plaster better come out of my jeans...

When we were doing the plaster demo, my professor said if there's a high part of the design then you have to cut a little vent in it to allow air to move through it so the plaster will fill it up...yeah I don't know, he went on about the "laws of physics" for about fifteen minutes.  But I did what he said and cut a vent into the little blocks on top so that plaster would fill it up.  For some reason though, it didn't.

Uhh, what the hell?


So I had to make some more plaster, get my clothes even dirtier, and fill up that little section on its own.


I don't really know how it's going to turn out.  Theoretically, it should look just like my little clay mold.  But I had some trouble with the foam board, piecing everything together was a little more complicated than it seems.  Plus, since I had to fill up that block by itself, I don't know if it's going to really mold with the rest of the plaster in the other sections.  I sure hope so, because I'm not trying to go back and re-do the whole foam board thing.

**Added Note:
If you ever work with plaster, make sure to get all the plaster out from under your fingernails BEFORE it dries.  It is NOT fun or pleasant trying to dig that crap out afterward.