Why do I have to title these lil buggers, anyway?

Sooooo.....

Drawing today! Yup. And on account of the fact that I was all rested (slash am STILL all rested) it was a beautiful day! Amazing how sleep or lack there of can do that to yah, huh? I have officially decided that Drawing is one of my most favoritist of classes! Why? Well, considering the fact that I only like my photography class because of the subject, and as much as film WILL be awesome, I'm still learning the basics, Art History is only as good as it can be considering what it is, we're not doing anything in English and LCD is a horrible horrible punishment, that pretty much leaves Drawing as my best class! Again, why? Because my drawing teacher is amazing! He's just such a good teacher! I really really like him. I remember still how on the first day I thought he was going to be intimidating and strict, but I've learned he's not at all, that's just how he talks. Sure, he's blunt, but I never find it to be in an offensive way. Maybe some people do because they're defensive about their work, but I think I pretty much know my abilities, or to put it better, I can tell where my work stands compared to what would be considered the best possible work or the worst possible work. So when he says my gestures are really bad, welp, they are, no getting around that. And it's not as if he just says it to say it, he's always very constructive with what he says. That's the other thing, he's just helpful in general. And I know I've said this already, but he really knows what he's doing as an artist, he understands in complete and total depth what he's teaching and there for can translate that into an explanation that actually helps us understand. Granted, he's also just really good at explaining things. Both the understanding and the explanation have to be there in order for it to work the way it does. It reminds me of Dad and his science. He just knows it, nothing else to it. So when he reads anything else that has anything to do with it, that knowledge translates automatically. Sorta like language, how English just comes. It's just there for us to call up when we need it or want it on command, or even automatically. More automatically. You get me? Point is, my drawing teacher REALLY knows his stuff. If we have to take more drawing classes in the future, I'm most defiantly switching into his class again.

So what did we actually do in class, you ask? Well, we turned in our homework and had a nice long hour and a half critique first thing. Usually we break it up and space it between drawing other things, but today went a little differently. Well, did I already explain the homework? Or was I being bitter and anti-homework explaining? We had two drawings due today, both 2 to 3 hour drawings. One was One-Point Perspective, a.k.a. a hallway would be the best example, something you're looking down into, an interior... and the other was Two-Point Perspective, a.k.a. the outside of a building, or an all square all parallel still life. I'll take pictures of mine and those of you that don't know one point and two point perspective should get a better understanding from seeing them. And I know this because (drum roll please...) MINE ROCKED! Granted, they weren't A drawings, but keep in mind that he hasn't given a single A in the class thus far, at least I think that's what he said. If not, maybe he's given ONE. So B drawings are basically awesome. Not that I know any of my grades yet, he doesn't tell us. But I figure I have a few B's, a few C's, and probably a few D's. But less D's more B's. He said we start at a C+ and work our way up or down from there, and it's hard work to go either way. No one's getting an A, but no one's getting and F either, at this point. Anyway, so one-point and two-point perspective are a piece of cake. Okay, maybe not quite. Maybe not a fluffy whipped cream piece of cake... maybe more like a dense flourless chocolate piece of cake. (I like my analogy, does it make sense to you? hehe). What I mean is, I get it, conceptually I have absolutely no problem with it. At all. Drawing it can also be simple. But that depends on what exactly I'm drawing, because boy, it can get complicated quick.

Which brings me to my next point. After we went over the homework and he praised mine as good examples a few times, he set us free, or rather, pushed us off a cliff to try and fly. He had us all go to the library, and until lunch, start another two-point perspective drawing somewhere inside there. We had about an hour. Now for the horrible hurdle the main character has to go through in the middle of the story only to either overcome it and make it a happy story or fail and make it a tragedy. Yup. Being rested makes for weird writings. Point is, I chose stairs. Yup. STAIRS! STAIRS?! WHY?! And I'm sure that means nothing to you, but oohhh no, stairs are just about the hardest possible thing to draw in two-point perspective! So I came back after lunch with nothing. Yup. Really. Nothing. Me and about 4 other people chose stairs. We ran into a few problems.... which I wont get into on account of the fact that they're complicated, that's why we ran into them. SMACK. Into them. Oops.

So we talked to him and he helped explain what was going on. See, I'll at least tell you this. Two-point perspective has two vanishing points. If you don't know what that means and are extra super curious, let me know and I can explain. Otherwise, don't worry about it. The problem we had was that it seemed like there were about a million vanishing points, or at least 4, instead of only two. So he explained how there really were only two, like there should be. So I asked him if I should pick a new spot since I was starting from scratch anyway, and he said no, considering what I'd done with the homework. I clearly understood it well, I could do it. It's just gunna be a ton of work. Which actually, I don't really mind, because for some reason, I get a kick out of this assignment. Ever notice how you enjoy things that maybe you're not totally comfortable with, but you're at least semi-comfortable with? Where you build on experiences you already know to discover new things and have those AH-HA moments? Kinda like how I HATE vine charcoal because I don't know what to do with it at all, I swear, it's like trying to draw with... maybe a marshmallow... I dunno... something obscure... and how I love long poses of the figure, which I'll get to next. So I understand object-space relationships pretty well, thanks to just having a knack for it and to the Engineering Academy. But even when I started in the Academy, I got it really quickly. Because of my Knack. Yes?

So I don't mind this drawing. Even though I have to start from the beginning, making it 7 hours of work yet to do. He asked us to spend 6 more hours and we should have already done an hour, so I need to spend 7. But man, I'm kinda juiced to get the finished product! I'm one of those people who get a rush of energy when I finish something. It feels really good to work really hard on something and then be done and have something freakin awesome. Which brings me to my NEXT point. Long drawings. I mentioned last week that we FINALLY started doing longer poses. A.k.a., we had been doing 1's, 5's, 10's, and the occasional 20-minute drawings. Now, we're doing 30-40 minute drawings, and I love it! It's so great because in the shorter drawings he wants us to get down as much information as possible as quickly as possible, at least it seems that way, but that's not always entirely true, I suppose. well, we have to work quickly but choose our marks carefully. It's freakin HARD! But with the longer poses, he wants us to go as slow as possible. Slow slow slow. And that's how I work! That's how I draw! How do you think I drew all those awesome portraits? Not in 10 minutes! Not in an hour! I spent at LEAST 8 on each, if not 10 hours. I measure. Carefully. I check my measurements. I re-check them. I draw a light line. Tiny. Tiny. Light. Re-check. Darker line. Build up lines. Onward! So now that we're doing longer poses and that's what he wants, I literally get down what seems like 10 lines in 20 minuets. Yup. I know. Crazy, right? But it's because the goal is for it to be perfectly measured. Who cares about the details? The details always suck if the mass and initial proportions of the main parts suck. So it's my nitch. My element. Long drawings. And give me 12 hours, I knock out a life like figure. Yup. Model's just can't sit that long. I can't wait for the day I can hire a model who'll sit in sessions and let me do that. Wait, actually, I can. I have so much more to learn before I can or want to do that! But it'll be fun once it comes.

I've always dreamed of learning to paint the way some painters do, portraits so beautiful, like what I've learned to do in a grey scale with pencil. It occurred to me while I was typing that last paragraph that most of you haven't even SEEN the drawings I'm referring to. Am I right? Well, maybe half of you have. Okay, maybe quite a few of you. But for those who haven't I'll post them. So with the long poses in class, I feel like I'm having some sort of breakthroughs, like I was talking about before. It's so exciting, like candy or something, (I dunno, that's what I think of...) to find that I can do things I maybe didn't know I could do. Or not even quite that, just how when you (you!) make something (you did that!) that's so awesome (how cool is that?!) and you're like BWAH! I DID THAT! LOOK HOW COOL THAT IS! You feel so neat and pound and it's truly exciting! I love love love drawing class for that! It's the class I really fell that progress in, I really enjoy the learning process or it, everything to be discovered. It's not like high school classes where they spit it at you and you have to regurgitate it back at them. No no. You have to learn it at your own pace. You don't have a choice. But that means that when you understand something and have that light bulb shine it's shiny little head off, it's that much sweeter because you did most of the work to get you there! I could go on forever about this... So moving on...

I have to go back to another open model session tomorrow because I fell asleep yesterday (can you believe I really did that? I think it's pretty funny... at least I sat down and I didn't fall asleep standing!) I did the first 20 minutes of the session, which were the gestures, as always. Did I explain how model sessions go, in general? Well, the model does 20-minute groups of poses and breaks in between. The first set is of one-minute gesture poses, generally very expressive with a lot of “movement” in the pose. What I mean by that is, though the model isn’t moving, the pose is dramatic, like they were caught in the midst of a movement. Like bending to the side with their arm reaching upward. Picture it. We then feel out the movement, where the weight is, where a central curved axis is reaching beyond the form. Well, it’s complicated. Again, I can try to go into more depth if anyone is curious. Just let me know. Then the next 20-minutes are generally 2-minute poses. But I can’t do anything with two-minutes. They’re really un-helpful to me. If I use them, I just do one-minute gestures and wait out the second minute. They’re too short for the other things I need to practice. In class, we don’t do two-minutes. That’s probably why I have no use for them. Then generally, there are two sets of 20 minutes with four 5-minute poses. With these we do (or my teacher taught us to do) the ellipse analyses, which I posted a few pictures in a previous entry for your viewing pleasures. The ellipses explore the way the parts of the body are oriented in space as well as the juxtaposition of parts. Then there are 10 minutes poses, which we do what my teacher likes to call Robots. They’re the rectangular cubes (uhm… I’ve forgotten the word for rectangular cubes…) which I also posted in a pervious entry. They explore the planes on the different parts of the body and how the parts are juxtaposed with one another as well. Then come a few 20 minuet poses. Maybe 2. How maybe sets of 20 minuets have I listed? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8… 8 times 20 is…. 2 hours and 40 minuets. Okay, so sometimes we do less of some and more of another, but it all balances out to maybe 7 sets so the models have enough time to break. The 20-minute poses we used for cross contour (and mind you, I’ve left out a lot of our problems, we had other things we worked on as well, like axial straight line… or… well there were others I’m sure of it…) But now instead of 20 minute poses, we do 40, remember? Which we use for taking our super-sweet time. There. Whew.

Anyways, so I only did the one-minute gestures yesterday, for which I still and always use my left hand to draw, and then I fell asleep. So since we’re beginning to focus on longer drawings as well now, it’s important that I do those in the open model sessions as well, because the whole point of the extra sessions is to practice! Before, I could leave early and not stay all 3 hours because I didn’t really need the 20-minute poses, but now I super do! So I have to go back tomorrow, and I think I’ll just show up in the middle so combining the two days I’ll have a full session.

Midterms are next week. I’m excited about Drawing’s midterm. I know, aren’t I a freak? We have to bring in EVERYTHING so far, in order, and pick out favorite to put on the wall for him. He’s going to review our things and talk with us about our progress individually and I’m super juiced! And out midterm project is this gigantically long two-point perspective Library drawing. That’s exactly why it’s so ginormous. We’re also allowed to bring in any work we’re re-done because it wasn’t so hot the first time we tried. I really really should re-do the log… But that’s a four hours drawing on top of my 7 hour drawing on top of the fact that I’m not even gunna be here this weekend! Right. That.

Mom’s flying in tomorrow night, and she’s staying at a snazzy hotel near Central Park, so for two days I’m ditching this joint and staying with her. That means that I have to find time other than Friday through Sunday to do that 7-hour drawing… Yup. Yikes. That means tomorrow, essentially. But tomorrow I wanted to go to the open model session… er… maybe I’ll just go next Tuesday instead. I’ll decide. AND tomorrow I have my first Piano Lesson! Yea! I know! I called the guy up and he suggested Thursdays and I was like OH MAN, PERFECT so he knows the piano downstairs in my dorm and he likes it so he’s coming by at 3:30 tomorrow and I’m play some tunes! Slash, some scales… It’s pretty spiffy and stuff. I’m ready. I hope he’s really cool and not a weirdo because I really want him to be awesome so I’m eager to learn and I stay with it. Yay for piano lessons!

Which means… I have to do my drawing around the lesson, which is fine because I’m not going to knock it out in one 7-hour sitting… or maybe I would, knowing me… But anyway, it’s fine, I just need to figure out when I should go start tomorrow. Point is, I decided to rent a camera for this weekend to do my next film project, which I may not even use and I’ll have to just rent it again next weekend because it’s not due yet, I have my LCD which isn’t hard, but I have to bring that with me to the spiffy hotel, of course I don’t have English and I have SO MUCH DRAWING and that’s the one things I HAVE to do here and I don’t have a choice! Either the Library, which is here… or the Log, which I WISH I could get to, which is in the drawing resources center, which is… you guessed it… here. And god, I don’t mind the drawing. He said I could re-do the log in pencil instead of vine charcoal, so now I kinda wanna try it over. But, it’s due in a week if I wanna re-do it. Lame. Arg, and Art History some how always freaking slips from my mind. I’ll have to bring that with me to the hotel, too. I’m getting really behind on my reading… and I’m wondering if I’ll even ever get to it…

And then of course, the part of the weekend will be spent taking pictures in Central Park! YAY! Man, I wish I could have an extra 2 days to get all this stuff done. I want to get it all done and get it done well. But time is mean like that. I’m lying, time just doesn’t give a shit. It’s indifferent. No emotions. Not mean. I managed to develop my film and make two contact sheets today between drawing and English. Now I know it takes about 2 hours to do that, for future reference. I got my paper back in English. He gave me a B+ because he thought it was still repetitious. I wonder if he noticed that I really did edit it. But meh, a B is fine with me. And he talked about Gulliver’s Travels because we were also talking about A Modest Proposal, which made me think that I wanted to re-read that book (weird, right?). But I read it for class in 10th or 11th grade, and I just don’t think I knew enough to get the satire or for it to make much sense at that time. So I want to re-read it now, with more knowledge to refer back to, and maybe get a better kick out of it. I dunno. I wonder if we have it at home…

Ah-ha! Now for a few random things. Did I mention I go a bloody nose the other day because the climate’s changed? Freakin poured for a while today. The bloody nose was awesome, though. I dunno, I get a kick out of them. They’re just so silly. The other thing is that the Pie Shop, which is the pizza shop here at school, serves Starbucks coffee, but they don’t have everything listed, so I was like aw, you losers, you don’t have white mochas! And I’ve managed to get to a Starbucks 3 times while I’ve been here and I got White Mocha Frappuccinos and they were delicious, but that’s it. So today I was just gunna get a mocha, but I automatically said white mocha because they are MY LIFE and then I corrected myself, but the woman said, so you want a white mocha? And I said? DO I EVER! So I had myself a delicious white mocha for way to freakin much money (you know how it’s $3.65 at Starbucks? Yea well it’s $4.60 at my school because they over charge on EVERYTHING! Have I mentioned by 7-dollar salads? Yup.) And I thoroughly enjoyed it. And now I will be thoroughly enjoying them almost every day. =D

Oh and, I’m getting to talk to some of the kids who are in both LCD and Drawing with me some more, and I like a lot of them a bunch. We almost never see each other outside of class, but they’re really cool and I love having class with them. It makes it all better, be it making LCD end eventually, or Drawing that much better. I hope I can become better friends with them so then I’ll have bunches of friends! All right, now I’m going to go ask Caitlyn for her camera and take pictures of my old portrait drawings and of the perspective drawings. And I’ll consider if there was anything else I wanted to show you guys…

The portrait drawings are in the order I drew them (I believe). They're from at least a year and a half ago.












And this is my One-point Perspective drawing. A hall in my dorm. Like a prison, no? The lines are all either horizontal, vertical, or direct back to the center vanishing point which is on the horizon (essentially, the horizon is your eye level and the vanishing point is directly in front of you on the horizon line.)


This is two-point perspective. Here the lines are vertical, or the trace back from either one of the vanishing points. There are two vanishing points instead of one, and they're not actually on the page. they relate to corners, If that makes sence. Like the front table in my drawing.


And this is the first long drawing we did, this one is from last week, and it was a 40-minute pose. See how few lines you can draw in 40 minutes? It's amazing. And you sure get the proportions right on. =)



And these are the flowers Adah gave me along with the latte the other morning when she surprised me. What an awesome girl =) I really enjoy this picture and the colors in it, for some reason. Grama, wouldn't this make a nice painting?



Hey! Just thought I’d leave you with a Fun Fact. Starbucks online tells you the nutrition information! Neat, huh?

Now you leave me your thoughts.