Cardboard Landmarks

Form and Structure assignment number one. Recreate an object using cardboard. Yup. I'm building with cardboard. I feel a little juvenile, but c'est la vie. It's actually kind of fun to work on. And as it stands, I have a final idea in my head as well as three very different prototypes made up. I have about a week to get the real thing done. I foresee a lot of cutting and sore fingers in my future. But hopefully all turns out well.

Excuse the horrible BB camera quality.

So what am I building exactly? The Eiffel Tower, of course.

A New List of Assignments

Back to school means a new list of work to do. Joyous joy. Taking five courses this semester, not just four. So the workload's going to be a little more hectic. And two of those courses will involve more essay writing. Not my strong point.

Photography, Narrative Strategies
- Take a photo-booth photo
- Must contain a visible narrative

Painting, Nature and Culture
- Series of three landscapes
- One naturalistic, one abstract, and one in between
- each canvas needs to be approx. 2x2 feet. (That's 12 square feet. That's a lot of paint.)

Form and Structure
- Find a common object
- Produce a series of sketches and a narrative
- Re-build object in cardboard/paper

Essay and the Argument
- Find a photo from NYTimes year in review
- Write 500 word descriptive essay
- Whatever photo will be your main subject for the remainder of the year

I have a few ideas for things already. We'll see how they pan out. My landscapes, I think, are planned out well enough. Just need to print out a few reference photos of trees and flowers. Finish colouring a few thumbnail sketches. Might post those later.

Also have a few thoughts on this Form and Structure object. It's between my Buddha statue or my Eiffel Tower model. ... So far.

As for this photo-booth thing, I'm stumped. Hopefully I can come up with an idea fast, because I don't have much time to get this thing finished and edited.

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.)

City Scape Rainbow

Finally finished Colour Exploration project number two. Where we had to take the colour scheme of one thing and apply it to something else. I pretty much looked to those cheap and tackily coloured plastic children's toys you can buy in the dollar store and applied that to a collage of my photos of buildings and architecture from New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence, and Verona. Creating a jumble of a city in a rainbow of colours that looks bright and cheery and child friendly. Which is usually not how cities are portrayed in art. (Dark and dingy and grimy, with lots of greys and monochromatic colours.)

I'm quite pleased with how it came out. I wasn't sure it would look the way I wanted it to while I was working on it, but I'm much happier than I thought. Now it's on to the printers to get it printed on some fabric so it can be made into a canvas. Woo.

As well, Frittata has been graded, and, like the last Time Based Media piece, received a B-. So I'm still content. However, drawing has given me my first C-. Average for the school, yes, but not anywhere near acceptable for me. Maybe I'm not used to getting Cs in art. And I get that there are people here better than me and marking needs to be done on a bell curve, but I can't get a grade like that again. Now I feel like I need to get something in the As to average it out. Fingers crossed and hopefully we'll see something a little better than a C-. Ugh.

Oh, and another 72% to add to the mix. On the first essay I had written in three and a half years. Go me. I've never been good with essays.

Just some random notes...

Something random here. Out of boredom and procrastination. And out of feeling the need to post something today.

Anyone with long commutes to school (or work) taking a subway or bus knows how long and boring it really can be. So people pack books to read, sketchbooks, notebooks, iPods, iTouches, ect. I personally go with the iTouch/book method. Though I'm always paranoid watching movies and TV shows on my iTouch is going to kill its battery. But I've found a new, super addicting, and free app. Something I'm sure a million people have found before me, but whatever. Pocket Frog. Sound lame? Yeah, maybe. It's like an amphibious version of Pokemon. You collect frogs. There's something like 10,000 possible species you can get. And you can sell them to make money to get bigger habitats and whatnot. I can't stop playing this thing. It's horrible.
So maybe you shouldn't download it. Unless you have lots of free time on your hands. Because I even found myself playing it at work. Oops.

Secondly, Moleskine notebooks. They're beautiful and awesome and have the best paper ever. You can get them for all sorts of things, different kinds of paper; storyboard, watercolour, lined, gridded, sketching..., different sizes, and they eat the money out of your wallet. Moleskine notebooks are amazing, but crazy expensive. So when I was in Dollarama the other day, and saw notebooks that looked almost exactly like Moleskine? 2$ each? I grabbed a handful. Sure, it's not the same quality, and the paper is a little thin, and the only options they come in are a black or brown cover, I still think they're great. Especially if all you're really doing is sketching and making notes. I love deals. And I don't look for them often enough. I need to work on my spending habits...

Also, memorizing dates sucks. (Curse you, Art History...)

The First Grade

Well, it may not seem like much, but considering the average mark at my university is a C-, I'm more than content with my B- on a project that I thought I had done horribly. Building circuits is something I'm not even the slightest bit familiar with, so it was nice to see my teacher gave me a decent grade even though I kept things super simple. Only using a motor that spins and a button to turn it on and off.

And while I'm also super proud that I was able to put a circuit together; never again. I'm way too paranoid that I'm going to electrocute myself or set the house on fire. That and I don't build things for the life of me, so yeah. No more circuits for me. I'll stick with my B- and be happy with that.

There's a Film in the Kitchen.

I have already started to work on my video project. Not due for another few weeks, but I figured I'd work on it anyways. I've never done video before. At least, nothing more than holding a camera up over my head at a concert and getting a short clip. I'm more of a photo taker personally.

So, having to film something performative. That was interesting. I was pretty stumped for ideas. (Though I did know I wanted to borrow the D90 from work to film.) So stretching the definition of performance, I went with a simple, everyday task. My mother cooking in the kitchen. She made some sort of frittata. So I basically got some shallow d.o.f. shots and will attempt to edit those later.

Filming is a little more fun than I thought. Though I've always had issues holding a camera steady, or straight for that matter. We'll see how things turn out...

Blog Entry Numero Uno.

Well, here it is. I have started yet another blog, on yet another site. And hopefully this one will be written in regularly. Such is my habit of starting and never finishing things. C'est la vie.


I have decided to give myself a little project, to add to the myriad of projects I already have. I want to create a blog to house my thoughts and plans for my school projects throughout my four years as an art student. Yes, I've already missed the month of September. Oops. But I'm sure that will be forgiven. There are still hundreds of assignments to complete, so I'm sure the blogging world hasn't missed much.


I have a fairly large list of things to complete at the moment, and hopefully some of these things will end up posted here:

• Visual analysis essay (art history)
• A picture painted half black and white (colour exploration)
• A three foot by three foot study of colour roles in society (colour exploration)
• One abstract watercolour (drawing)
• One surreal watercolour (drawing)
• A study of facial features (drawing)
• A drawing of a tree with the negative spaces coloured in with texture(drawing)
• A one to three minute video performance (time based media)

Needless to say, I have a lot to do, and perhaps distracting myself with a blog isn't the best idea. But then again, I've never been very focused.