Chroma Chronicles

Haven't updated in a while. Been incredibly busy with assignments. I'm practically drowning in them. But I at least finished the final assignment of my Colour Exploration class. Wooo.
The idea was basically to use multiple media (which I did, with ink, pencil crayon, paint, mylar, graphite, marker, and collage) and at least two different narratives in one piece.

So I ruined a first edition, 1950's copy of a British book. I drew, painted, and glued in a number of different parades making their way through the pages. I didn't get it quite finished, but I did do a few dozen pages. Which, if you're drawing something new that many times, it takes longer than you'd think. I'm pretty happy with it.

First page, and the beginning of the parade.

A fashion runway, featuring the designs of the amazing Alexander McQueen

Chinese New Year

Funeral procession

Photos from a Korean parade I stumbled across in New York by accident.

Photo Session

Took some photos for my Time Based Media blog this morning. All inspired by the amazing Mika Ninagawa. I love her photographs. They're pretty much what I inspire to take. I only wish I could get in somewhere that had a ton of goldfish. Her goldfish photos are some of my favourite.

So here are some photographs. All flowers. I figure they'd be more fun to look at than my research paper for History.

I'll have to take a few more in the morning, because all my favourites came out portrait, and I really need them in landscape. Silly me.

Time Based Media Blog

Just to make note, I am creating a blog specifically for my Time Based Media course. This is an actual assignment, and it will contain all of my Time Based Media projects. An audio file, a short film (which is posted further back on this blog,) and a video of my electronic project.

It can be found right HERE!

Rococo and Notebook Doodles

So we had a mini assignment for Colour Exploration. We had to look at "bad" art. Of course I looked at kitschy art. Because it's awesome. Just a simple 8x10 sized drawing or painting to hand in. Nothing huge like my ridiculous drawing assignments.
One of my favourite things to draw is Rococo era costume and hair, so of course I stuck with that, making up some crazy powdered wig and lots of pink, with some frills, pearls, ribbon, and flowers thrown in. (All in pink of course.) I used copic markers for this one. Hadn't used them in a while. Because nothing I do for school lets you use markers. Which is quite sad really. They're such awesome things to work with.

Here she is, the stuck up Rococo aristocrat. I'm actually super thrilled with how the hair came out. ... I'm sure the teacher will give me a 1.374 out of 2 or something. He tends to give the most random grades.

Also, out of boredom, I thought I'd post some notebook/sketchbook doodles. When you have a 2 hour lecture followed by 3 hours of waiting around for your tutorial to start, it's hard not to doodle.

African/Pacific Art History notes. Complete with teen!Kenny and teen!Craig from South Park. (Been watching too much of that lately... Mysterion!)

Stylized Shiina Ringo, a super talented pop singer. Two costumes from her Expo DVD, which was amazing. And some more Art History notes.

And from drawing, an attempt at the maiko sakkou hairstyle, from memory. So it's probably very incorrect. I tried. It was more fun to draw than blocks. (I swear, our drawing teacher thinks we're incompetent.)

Drawing.

Metaphor drawing is completed. Hip hip hooray. It came out kind of kitschy. But kitschy in a good way I think. (I like kitschy stuff.) Unfortunately, the teacher wasn't totally thrilled with it. She kept mentioning how the hair looked like it wasn't coming out of the head properly, and how the hairline was too low and far forward. Well, I tried to explain that it was a drawing of a woman wearing a wig, but I don't think she was really listening. So yet another B- for me.

Except for the grade, and critique gone wrong, I did have fun making the piece.I threw in some collage and stitching, which I hadn't done in a while for some reason. Because I love collage and sewing. And neither are done enough in art. Also did a bit of painting with tea. A wash, mostly. Never tried that before, but it was interesting. And now my brush smells.

Tea for painting. You can see a tiny bit of the wash there on the paper.

Some of the pages I stained. They were cut up into cherry blossom petals before being collaged into the drawing.

The original idea was to paint in "Living Art" with red ink, but my writing is horribly messy, and the stitching turned out nicer. (Though it's a little crooked... Ugh.)

Part of the collage. Using photocopied pages from Mineko Iwasaki and Komomo's autobiographies, and then some washi paper I picked up in Japan, and some random origami paper found lying around the house.

And the final piece. Light shading (which the teacher also didn't like,) light washes, collage, and stitching. The flower in the bottom corner is the crest of this particular Geiko's okiya, or geisha house.

This is the second time I've really done anything geisha related for class, and it's the second time I've had to defend my work because people either don't understand how a geisha looks or what it is they do. So, despite being one of my favourite things to draw or paint, I may have to stop because my grades may suffer from a lack of understanding from the teacher's point of view. It's incredibly disappointing. Maybe next semester I'll get someone who actually understands, even just a little.

(Not likely.)