My joys:

We had a wonderful day! The sun was shining, the flowers were in bloom, and the children were all smiles. And despite my poor little Kodak EasyShare C340 being broken and out of date, I got some really great pictures. Even though this was a few weeks ago, I frequently look at these pictures to remind myself how blessed I am.

Catrina and Matthew look like they could be brother and sister, with their fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes. They are most definitely my angels.

I love this picture of Matthew so much I even made an etching of it to print in my etching class. I can't say I did a fantastic job, but the heart and sentiment were there.

My artistic inspiration

              

           When we got this project asking us to list 25 things that shaped us as an artist, many different memories started coming back to me.  The memory that came to the fore front of my mind was when my mom bought me this clay book.  When I was in second grade we had a book fair at my school, my mom knew i was kind of into drawing and crafts so she picked me up a copy.  When she gave it to me I didn't think to much of it, until a little later on when i started flipping through the pages.  Once I started seeing all the different clay creations in the book I was hooked. For some reason I became so fascinated with all that you could do with clay.  

       I began to try to make the objects in the book, the first one I can remember was this sumo wrestler guy.  I started carrying clay with me everywhere, which turned out to a little bit of a problem.  My mom for some reason didn't like this mobilization of clay, probably because it started showing up in my  pants pockets along with the wash, and in the carpet at home.  I always reminded my mom it was her fault for buying the book, that didn't go over so well either.  I really have to give credit to my mom and this book, because if I never had received  the book I'm not sure if I would have pursued art.  I just know that once I got into clay modeling I really started enjoying art.  Before I kind of liked art,  just drawing doodles like every kid does, but this seemingly small thing( a Clay book bought at a book fair) created in me a love for art.

amazing how time gets away from you..

I guess I feel older today. It's always interesting to think of the aging face. What a tiny crease I may have now could turn into a laugh line one day. These are the things that mark age. You see a statue or a painting with wrinkles and you automatically read age. I guess vaguely it reminds me of this: the same girl with or without wrinkles who seems to be older or younger. It's also how "myspace" angles make someone look younger and thinner, often.

Wrinkles are something you learn early to photoshop onto a face to add age (and it's fun to photoshop makeup on to people too, or is that just me?) They kind of seem to fit a little formula. you've got the two slants beside the lip /o\ , the forehead creases .=. , the crows eyes >. .<.. other entirely normal things. things you learn to appreciate with time. and it makes this cute little emoticon:

>.=.<
_/o\_

yeah.. i dunno what to write and i'm tired. but hey, emoticons are art, yeah? :(

As Time Goes By

I was part of an amazing opportunity about a month ago. I was entered in a 48 hour film competition with some of my best friends in the world.

It was an experience of a lifetime and as I've reflected on the grueling, sleep deprived weekend over which the film process took place I am yet again reminded of how one is never through with looking.What was so wonderful about this experience was probably working with some great people and observing how all of our talents contributed to the overall film-making process.

The guidelines were simple: 1) The film must make a reference to a very famous movie. 2) The film must be between 3 and 5 minutes. 3) The film must end with the line "Don't be a hero."

The plot is about a working girl and a man who is slightly out of his element looking to pick up a working girl for the night. It is almost a reference to the movie "Pretty Woman" with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in the sense that the desire is to save a valuable woman from a dangerous harsh life. So needless to say this man wants to save this woman from her lowly existence and sweep his damsel off of her feet. It is done in the styles of memoir and film noir. The male character gives the audience a sense that this has already happened or that he is reliving the experience of rescuing this woman from her dark life. There is then a twist. We then find out that the man never rescued the woman. He looked back, saw her and drove away. He did not want to interfere with her life, she is living this life because she chose it. He could not rescue her from her own world.

The process involved in creating a film is very meticulous and even with 3 pairs of eyes it proves to be very difficult to see every flaw in the system. Editing is certainly evidence of such a statement. During the editing process we had to pay very close attention to where exactly the actors are in each shot and if it is a split shot where we see several different angles to the shot it is extremely difficult to match every specific position. I know of a few things that (due to time and resources) I know are flaws, even though they are not too apparent.
Film creating is very similar to drawing in the sense that it is a very drawn out process of observation, changing and reworking.
Just as thrilling as a plot twist can be in realizing that the last hour and a half of your movie going experience was all a misleading journey into a beautiful or ghastly truth, life is also just as misleading. We reach inevitable truths that we believe to be permanent but with different insight the perspective might change. We see one side in the film "Don't be a hero- As Time Goes By" that the man is trying to rescue her because he feels that he would not want to live through the same dark and unrelenting pain that he imagines this woman having. From a moral standpoint it presents a very interesting argument. Should he rescue her or allow her to rescue herself if she so desires? Does she want to be rescued in the first place? Does she want someone to rescue her? The truth is is one can never truly decide for someone when one is in the place that this man was in. Don't take an immediate reaction to someone's lifestyle as being something good or bad.
So As time goes by continue to observe, continue to look because you are never done with looking.

15 properties

So in one of my classes we are reading Christoper Alexander's The Phenomenon of Life, Book One: The Nature of Order. Not that I am really recommending the book, but he talks about how everything has a certain degree of life to it; not biological life, but some things just "feel" and "connect" to our souls more. He never really makes this idea of exactly how you decide why things have life. But I think that the concept is really fascinating, especially in drawing, as we are the re creators of a scene:
We get to assign life to objects.
This is his most easily explained property, there is a list of 14 others, and personally I find them very subjective and sometimes represented unfairly in his comparisons, but I think that they can have some influence into how we think about drawing. They are:
alternating repitions
boundaries
contrast
deep interlock and ambiguity
echoes
good shape
gradient
local symmetries
levels of scale
non-seperateness
positive space
roughness
strong centers
simplicy and inner calm
the void

I think that ever since learning about these I think about them more in everything, especially in these charcol drawings we are doing.

Wondering about Art

art on the brain
work by Guilherme Marconi

I enjoy making blog entries but I've found that coming up with topics to post about is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I haven't done so in while, but after attending a very interesting talk today and reading other entries, I now have something in mind.

It is now the time for advising for the classes we will take next semester. Though I have a good idea of what classes I'll be taking, I've been bothered by other thoughts about the "somewhat" near future. I'll be a junior next semester and in 2 more years I'll be flung into real world. I'm not exactly sure what I'm suppose to do after that. I'd love to get my dream job in the art industry, but the thought of this economic situation we are in makes me rather queasy. I don't know if I'll be ready to compete for my bread and butter in a world full of many other talented individuals. I feel like my bachelors degree isn't enough. All these worries sometimes make me have doubts about whether I could survive and be successful as an artist.

I love art and can't imagine anything else I'd be good at doing...I think it's a career that gives me the most creative freedom. But how do you know if something is meant for you? I hope I'm not delusional in my pursuit. During my advising I wanted to ask my adviser about her experience working in a publishing company, and what I need to do to get into something like that. Although I didn't really get a chance to ask her. I was however, able to attend a lecture talk by Adam Burke this afternoon. He is an animator for Pixar. It was a very insightful talk in which he described the many processes of creating an animated film, the perks, and how a student can become an animator. The talk seemed to inspire something in me. From everything that he described, I knew that I wanted to do the same (or something similar). His job is just so much fun and also very rewarding, and I know that creating art in some form is something I want to do. I guess I just need some reassurance that I'm doing the right thing for myself. Also after reading some blog entries I definitely know that I share the same passions as others.

I wonder if other art students feel worried about life after college? It can be a scary thought. I just know above all we have to do the things we love the most.

I always have a lot of trouble coming up with topics for this blog, since blogging isn't something I do very often. A friend of mine suggested talking about how important drawing is to my everyday life. She mentioned that if she were no longer able to draw, she would feel completely handicapped, and I have to say that I would feel exactly the same way. If I have a piece of paper in front of me, or really anything that can be marked on, and a writing utensil, more often than not I am going to draw on it. My dad's old desk top calendar's are proof of this and my notes are also filled with doodles in the margins. I think I would go crazy if I could no longer draw and get my ideas down on paper. In addition to actually creating art, I probably spend just as much time if not more looking at other people's art. Much of my free time is spent browsing the art community site DeviantArt. I have been a part of an online art community so long that I can't really imagine life with out it. I feel like my access to art would be so limited, especially art that fits into my range of interest. The internet has become a great way for artists to expose their work to the public (though it makes art theft and plagiarism a big problem as well). Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling. I hope this post isn't too incoherent. I would love to hear other people's opnions on drawing on a day to day basis and their thoughts on online art communities.