End of January Comments

I must say, that even though it is just the end of January I am sick of snow. I had only 3 days of classes this week because we had another snow storm come through that canceled one day of classes. It was Wednesday for me here in the Northeast, though I do know from reading elsewhere that a lot of the country got hit by this storm which included sleet and rain causing very slick roads and many power outages. We had snow then rain, but because I didn't have to go anywhere I didn't have any issues. Well I did go out, I needed some paint for a project we are doing in my Color and Design class. Last week we did the color wheel, it was due Monday morning. Our new project it is make a color star that was developed by Johannes Itten. If you follow this link you will read a bit about him and lower down on the page is an image of his Color Star that I am trying to reproduce. The star just expands the basic color wheel showing tints and tones for each color. It is an exercise designed to get us familiar with mixing colors.

http://froebelweb.tripod.com/web2018.html

My Color Wheel is below, we are working with Gouache, an opaque watercolor paint. I used just the red, blue, yellow primaries for this wheel, though for the star I have added a purple and green paint. Impurities in the paint make it very hard to mix a good purple (violet).

One additional comment on color, while searching for an image of Itten's color star for here I came across this web site that has all sorts of interesting tools and information about color and the use of color, though I would share it and hope you find it as interesting as I do.

http://www.worqx.com/color/index.htm

I missed my 2nd Typography and Computer Graphic classes, but will show you some images from Mondays homework assignments. In Typography we used various materials to "create" a library of strokes, from those marks we picked three and are going to create 9 "letters" from those three strokes. I have an image of the three strokes I selected, but the "letters" are just on tracing paper and don't photograph well so you will have to wait. Not to mention that I need to have my "letters" critiqued which would have happened Wed if we had had class.

For my Computer Graphics class we had to create 10 lego designs then using our imagination think what they looked like to us and draw that object. I have only one photo here for you, since the drawings are on tracing paper they are hard to photograph but I think you can get the idea of what I have been doing from this image. My 10 items are: key, cat, pyramid, bridge, saw horse, plane (pictured), sword, chair, shoe and railroad crossing sign.

Left is the Lego plane, and right is my drawing of a real plane

This is the 2nd class I missed Wednesday, again we were supposed to have critiqued our drawings, and would probably have selected the image we will use to finish the project on the computer. This will probably now be done in Monday's class.

In drawing this week we first looked at some slides then went into the studio and drew from the instructors Studies CD. I am posting 5 of the studies I did, there were a few more, but I think these are the best. For homework I have to do 7 studies from the photos he handed out with the homework assignment. The good part is that we are only supposed to spend 15 to 20 minutes on each one so it should only take a couple of hours to do. The bad is that I do have to do seven drawings. We are supposed to have a live model next Tuesday. Wish me luck. Drawing from life is harder then drawing from a photo or projected image.

On the quilting front, I have been working on my bed quilt, tucking threads away, almost done with that thank heavens, then I get to trim and sew on the binding (which is made). Next step will be to sew the binding down, put a label on the quilt and it will be done. Wish it was as fast to do as it is to write about.

I have also been working on my January FFFC challenge piece. I got the background pieced last weekend and just need to get the images that are supposed to be on the front cut out, and machine appliqued. Hmm that just is a bit misleading as it will take a few hours to manage all that. Not sure I will make tomorrow's deadline and get this one finished on time, but I should be able to finish it before we get our next challenge next month. Since I haven't done much more with the December Challenge then a few sketches I think that is doing good.

Hope everyone is staying warm and busy at this chilly dark time of year.