February, Friday the 13th

It has been a busy week for me at school. We started a new assignment in Typography. Where we have to create a 27th letter for the alphabet. First we picked a sound, I have picked TH, then a font, I am using Bodoni MT then we had to design a new letter for our sound. I have done that and am at the stage when it has to be transferred to hot press board and inked. It is due at my next class. I also completed a couple of assignments in Color and Design, finished the Lego project for my Graphic Design course and had another session of "Life" drawing in my drawing class.

First I will show you the Color and Design images, the first is my Color Star. I am pleased with some of it and not so pleased with other parts. I mixed all the colors using 5 tubes of paint, blue, yellow, red, a violet and a blue green. Color wheels seem to take way more yellow then they should. I don't want to tell you how much yellow paint I have been using.

Our next project was to do two studies, one with monochrome tints and shades, and the other was to mix various grays using complementary colors on the color wheel. I think the monochrome is rather nice, I used my blue green paint for that one. On the grays, well.. all I can say is I was getting a bit tired of mixing, so a couple of my colors aren't as grayed as they should be. The writing on the bottom of the gray tones is the percent of colors I used to get the tone.

In Graphic Design we finished our Lego project by combining the photo of the lego with the grayed image of what we imagined the lego to be. I picked a nice chair, so if you look closely you can see that my lego is casting the shadow of that chair. I am fairly pleased with how this came out.

In drawing my first images for you are my 2nd homework assignment. There are 4 photos here, they were fairly quick sketches so don't have a lot of detail, mainly gesture and form. You may recognize some of these poses as I have done them before, in class I think, but these are my homework assignment, and not the same drawings.

Next I have just 3 of my classroom drawings for you. We did about 15, but that is way more then I want to either take pictures of or upload here. First is one of the fairly quick studies that we did, where the model held the pose for about 5 minutes, the last two were longer poses so I was able to include more shadows and details.

That's it for this week. I am still working on my stamps for playing around with my letter forms on fabric. But otherwise didn't manage any quilting this week at all after I finished the challenge piece last Saturday. I hope to find some time to work on my bed quilt binding, or machine quilting on a smaller piece that I have sitting around waiting to be quilted this coming weekend. As always feel free to comment.

FFFC Challenge # 29

Houses, View #1

Well I am a week late with this, but considering all my school work I think I have done fairly well. Of course it isn't very big, only 12.5 x 9.75 inches. The FFFC challenge for January was to use Analogous Colors, with a composition concept of Rhythm/Movement or Tension/Energy. Working with my theme of Structures for these challenge series I went back to my first challenge images and created houses. I drew a rough sketch of what I wanted to do then went to work. These houses are tall and narrow, and because I did them free form not quite straight. Going through my stash of hand dyed fabrics I decided on a color scheme of green, blue green, blue. I pulled fabrics from light to dark with those colors, cut strips of various widths and strip pieced them together from light to dark. Then I cut the strips apart and pieced them back together to create the background. Once I had the background pieced I realized that one of the light fabrics was in a bad place, it was more or less in the middle of the work and much too light for the surrounding fabrics. If it had been at the edge it would have worked just fine, but not in the middle. It just didn't fit in. So I pulled out the shiva paint sticks and using green I darken the strip. I created templates for the houses from my sketch out of freezer paper, then cut out the house shapes and machine appliqued them down to the background. Sandwiching the top I then machine quilted in a random way the entire background with no quilting on the houses.

I realized that the painted fabric was still too bright so I pulled out the fabric inks and inked in a pattern on the fabric. I then decided that I needed to do a bit of embellishing so I added the embrioderied trees in the background and the bushes in the foreground. I also added beaded rooftops to the houses.

I am not sure how well I like this piece. I think it fullfills the design elements and works as an over all design. But I think if I had to do it over I would have pieced the background with a bit more care. Comments are welcome.

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.