Week 7 of School

School this past week was good though I only had classes on Tuesday and Wednesday because of the Columbus day Holiday on Monday. In Color and Design I am moving on to my self portrait project and we learned about one of our next projects (the one after the shoes) which will be to design 5 stamps (ACK). As a former stamp collector I am so familiar with stamps that it shouldn't be too hard to do this, still I am not really looking forward to it. One of our stamps has to be a sports figure. Hmm guess I should be buying some magazines to get some pictures, or check out the newspaper sports pages. I did manage to get my portrait done on Monday and used Wednesday class time to get my grid done.

In Computer Graphics we are still working on Illustrator techniques. We learned how to break apart a font, a handy tool if you want to create logo's from initials. I have to say that letters like the letter "A" are a bit tricky to cut apart, course it just could have been the font I was using for my experiments.

Drawing class this week had us working with pen and ink and using different line qualities to create shadows since you can't smudge ink. Below is my first try, I am not very happy with it, I didn't sketch in the sunflowers and when I was inking got them the totally wrong size, they look like daisy's not sunflowers (sigh)

Next try was this Bust, I can't recall who exactly it is, some Roman, I do know that . I sort of like this one, at least you can tell it is an older male human.

This next photo is of my 3rd try, ran out of class time and didn't finish, you can see the pencil lines around the top. I also need to do a bit more work on the face. This is from a photo, but is another sculpture. The mouth is good, and I suppose I should finish it. But, we have homework of 3 pen and ink drawings for next Tuesdays class, and so far I only have one finished. I do have two others that I am working on, but I think I need to finish them before I go back to this one.

My last photo this week is the still life charcoal drawing I did 2 weeks ago for my homework assignment. I am pleased with the bananas, and I think it really does work as a composition. That said the photo really isn't very good. I didn't realize until I went to crop it that it is a bit out of focus. Still you can get the general idea of what this looks like.

On the quilting front about all I have been doing is quilting a couple of UFO quilts. One is about the size of a baby quilt, my paper pieced mariners compass blocks. The other is a twin sized bed quilt. The top is hand pieced batik blocks that I finished ages ago, started quilting but never finished. I got the basic grid quilting done, but when I started quilting the blocks didn't like what I was doing, what thread I was using etc. so stopped. I took out the old quilting on the blocks and am using a different thread and a different quilting pattern. This time I think I like it so it is just a question of finding the time and energy to get it done. This next Friday will be our next Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. Wonder what it will be this time.

6th week of School

I am finding it hard to believe that I have been in school six weeks, doesn't seem like it has been quite that long. Otherwise classes have been going well, and I finally finished my 3rd Color and Design project. See below. The assignment was to take a leaf draw it on a large sheet of paper that had been divided into rectangles and then fill in the sections using the methods assigned in a handout. The handout required that we use various media and techniques, like color marker, color pencil, ink, brush, pen and even a twig , that one was a bit strange needless to say. So below is my leaf, I used a Japanese Maple leaf, see the upper right corner for what the leaf looks like when it isn't divided into sections. Since some of this was done using stipple and crosshatch, it has taken way too long to get done. I don't know if I like this or not, but it was an interesting exercise to do.

Drawing class this week had us using white chalk on black paper, the torso below is my third effort, my first which I didn't take a picture of was some more of our white vases, but this time the background was black. The torso I was drawing was also black, so what I needed to draw was the light hitting the torso, not quite as easy as it sounds.

The picture below was actually my second study, a bust (not sure the material, plaster I think) of a young girl, mine doesn't look as young as she should, and I have decided that I need to try and do more drawings of faces and heads. But with that in mind I sort of like how she turned out. I have to say that this style of drawing is exhausting to do, haven't been so exhausted after a class since the first full drawing class we did. I was wiped, and didn't manage to do much of anything that evening.

My last image for you this week is the homework I did for last week, more of the negative space drawings - or erasures since that is what I am really doing, erasing the background and leaving the dark for the image, in this case a plant. I had tried doing a pen and ink of a small jade plant, but it wasn't a good composition, not enough plant. My problem was that the rest of my plants were too dense for me to be able to draw them this way, and I wasn't taking a pair of scissors to my plants just so I could do some homework. This is a young Christmas Cactus which worked, though I did simplify some areas. I am pleased with this one, since I got an A on it

That's it for this week, sorry that some of the pictures aren't very good, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on them so am not pinning them to something to take the photo's, that means that sometimes the paper slumps a bit. Still they are good enough to give you an idea of what I have been doing. In the Computer graphics class we are working with Illustrator using the pen tool, what a pia that tool can be to use, however it is a critical one so I need to master it.

FFFC Challenge #25

My other project for the week, other than school and homework has been the completion of my first official challenge for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge Yahoo Group. We received our challenge instructions last Friday. For this year of challenges we are to work in series. I have chosen Structures to be my theme for this year (well the next few challenges anyway). Then for the September challenge, we needed to use a complementary color scheme, I chose red violet and yellow green. Then we were supposed to work with vertical, horizontal or diagonal layout. I think I would consider mine a diagonal layout.

I have been wanting to do a quilt using rooftops on the diagonal overlapping each other, so my design (which I did in Illustrator) includes 5 houses that move into the distance. I added a sixth house in the lower right to balance the houses on the left. I used Illustrator to create some templates (which I cut out of freezer paper) for the houses and the pieced background. After putting all the houses on the background fabric I realized that I needed to add something to the sky to keep viewers eyes from moving off the quilt, I didn't really want to use a white fabric and I didn't have any lighter red-violet fabrics so spent a bit thinking - ahha, I have white angelina I though, I can use that. So I did, it adds some iridescence to the sky and you can see the background fabric through it. It is quilted down. I used batik, hand dyed, and one commercial fabric, machine quilted with various weights of cotton threads, and I added some hand embroidered pearl cotton. That and the Angelina for clouds is the materials list for this little quilt, which is 8.5 x 12 inches. I actually finished this just under the deadline of noon on the Sat a week from the challenge issue date.

Oh yes I have named this little guy Street View #1, at least it makes it sound like it will be a series.

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