February brings Ground Hog Day

Well, we had ground hog day this past week, Monday February 2nd. and depending on which ground hog you believe in we will have 6 more weeks of winter weather to live through. Since here in New England we had more snow during the week and the temperature has fallen into the deep freeze, I think it is obvious that we are going to have at least six more weeks of winter weather - maybe more. That said we are supposed to have some warming this weekend, so we should have some snow melting. Which believe me will be much appreciated.

The good news is that despite the snow I had all my classes this week. Though I only have images of my artwork from two of them. In Typography we critiqued our letter forms and then transferred them to hot press board and inked them in. My results are below. The instructor though my forms would make nice stamps and I agree so during my recent trip to the art supply store I purchased a carving block and some Lumiere paint. Not sure when I will find the time to do this experiment but I do think it will be fun to play with my letter forms on fabric. I will make a stamp for each stroke that way I can combine them various ways. I will post pictures when I manage to have some results so you can see how they look on fabric.

Our next project is to design another letter (the 27th) for our Alphabet, including a sound for the letter. Homework for Monday is to pick a couple of fonts that we like. So far I have 4 and need to narrow it down a bit, we are only supposed to have two.

In Color and Design I am still working on my Star. The good news is I only have 2 points left to do, the bad news is we have more homework. Making 2 different gridded panels. On one we will paint, black, white, gray along with tints and shades of one color. This is our Monochromatic study. The other we need to mix grays using complementary colors and white. My one comment here is that if I don't know color and how to use it by the end of this course I never will.

In my Graphic design class I have selected my project image, it will be a chair. I found a great picture of an arm chair that I will use as the shadow. That project is due on Wednesday so I should have an image for you when I post next week. In the meantime you can see what the lego chair looks like. I have been busy this morning taking pictures. Most students were told to take their pictures against a white background so it would be easy to select just the image in Photo shop. Since my lego pieces are white I went for a black background. Good think I had some black construction paper around. Oh yes this is the first time I have used the light box that I created to take pictures of my jewery in. It is made out of foam board with tissue paper covering openings. That way I can shine lamps in through the tissue paper windows and not get shadows or glare. With additional sunlight this morning I didn't need to use the flash on the camera.

Since we had snow most of Tuesday I was concerned that we wouldn't have our drawing class. I really didn't want to miss it because we were having our first live model. Fortunately we did have class. The instructor shortened the class a bit so we could leave early and miss a bit of traffic but it was still a good class. I was totally exhausted by the time I got home that night, and not from driving in the snow. The Instructor really pushed us and we did a lot of drawings, maybe around 15 to 20. I am NOT going to show you all of them, not even close to all of them. Most were sketchy since the beginning poses were only about 5 minutes long. Example below:

The idea was to get the gesture, you can see that I started out with the torso not quite long enough so had to move his legs down a bit, still I rather like this one, it has an energy to it that my Instructor is trying to get me to put into my figure drawings. The lighting was set up so that the model was mostly in shadow so we could see the silhouette easier. Toward the end of the class the model was holding longer poses so I have three more images for you where I had time to do a bit more then create an outline.

My last images are my first homework assignment for Drawing II. We were drawing from photos from his poses CD. Some of these should look familiar as I have drawn them before in class. Since I took more time with the homework assignment these are a bit better I think.

Instructor liked this one.

I am still working on my FFFC challenge quilt, but hope to have it done this weekend. If I get it done I will update the blog with an image and a bit of information about how I went about creating it. I did manage to get the binding sewn onto the bed quilt last weekend and am in the process of sewing that down. Sort of put that aside while I am focusing on the challenge piece and will get back to it when the challenge is done.