Back to School

After taking about a month off I am happy to report that I am now back in school. The month off was the schools scheduling not mine. But I was happy to spend 2 weeks with my Sister in Chicago over the Holidays though the weather could have been a bit nicer. The last two weeks I have been home working on various projects and visiting with friends. I haven't been doing a lot of drawing at home (though I did a lot in Chicago) instead my main project has been to try and finish quilting a twin size bed quilt. This quilt has been in the need to finish quilting stage for longer then I care to admit so it was good to be working on it. I have two borders left to quilt, binding to put on, and threads to tuck away. Hopefully even though I am now back in school I will still be able to find the time to get this finished soon. My other sewing included finishing the piecing of the blocks for a Batik nine patch. I managed to get those blocks laid out and am now sewing rows together.

Classes for this term are Color and Design II, Drawing II, Typography, and Intro to Graphic Design and Production. I had at least one class in all my courses this past week. Two meetings of Color and Design II, and one of each of the others. Drawing only meets one day a week.

We are going to be doing a color wheel for Color and Design II, not terribly exciting, but something that all students need to do. We are using only the 3 primary paint colors - red, blue and yellow in Gouache paint. I need to try and find a better blue, the shop where I was purchasing my supplies was running low on the brand I wanted, and they didn't have the correct blue left in stock, I purchased a blue, but it isn't the right one. So later today I have to go see if I can find something better. I will post a picture of this when done, even though it isn't terribly exciting.

Our first project for Typography (the study of fonts) will be to create our own strokes and then create 9 "letters" using those strokes, I think that is going to be kind of fun but we will see.

For the Computer course we had to purchase Lego's, and we will be building something out of 3 to 5 Lego's that we will then imagine as something, lots of drawings and thumbnail sketches are required for this one, then it will be done on the computer for our completed project. My first issue was finding Lego's, they didn't have them when I was young so I never played with them. Meaning I don't have any old ones laying around. I finally found a small box but I think I have to ignore one of the instructors requests, use only one color, as the blocks I have to use are several different colors. Oh well, guess I could paint them if he really complains.

Drawing is going to be studying the figure, mainly nude, but we will also be doing some study's with bones. For the first class we had lecture, some slides and then did 4 drawings from his CD of models. We will have live models at some point but not just yet. So my images for you this week are my 4 sketches/studies, I hesitate to call them drawings, that we did in class. Sorry about the photo quality, I should have moved the paper out of the sun, but you can get the general idea of what I was doing.

These two are really the same pose, first seen from the side then rotated to show the back view, and yes I do mean rotated, it is really cool how he can just rotate the image on the computer screen until we see a different view of the pose.

We didn't have very long with this pose, he decided that it was a bit harder to draw then he initially though, and changed it out for the following. I think sometimes he picks poses that he would like to draw.

Oh yes, one last comment for this week, on the FFFC yahoo group we received our January Challenge, the challenge this month is to use Analogous Colors - those are 3 colors next to each other on the color wheel, such as Red, orange red and red violet. The design element is using Rhythm/Movement or Tension/Energy. The last two are design concepts I read about in Color and Design I and basically involve using repetition. Hmm have to think about this for a bit. Think I will be going back to my houses (or something similar) that I used for the first Challenge. But am still thinking on this.