Science Chart

Sort of an original and unexpected assignment--our next big to do in drawing class is to create a scientific chart of some aspect of nature, similar to those that used to be in science textbooks (before hi def photos replaced them).
Like these:

I guess because of my fishing background, their visual value, and my ability to identify them in the wild, I went with common lake bed plant life. Rather then formatting around genus's or species's or whatnot, I went with the ones I encounter the most while excluding "floating" or "emergent" (like cattails, reeds, and lilly pads) weeds only because they would switch up the overall look of the piece too much.

Here's the thumbnail

I don't think I going to use markers and colored pencils on the final piece but instead use oil pastel overlayed with watercolor which creates a cool effect. I'm also going to work on a very tall and slender piece of paper in order to accentuate the towering nature of these plants... and also because it will look cool.

Binding pt 2

The next part of the sketchbook binding had to with constructing a hard cover to fit around the bound pages and create something that looks official. This next part of Girard's lecture involved a large amount of measuring and cutting in order to create a perfect fit for the folios. Since there was no sewing involved, I was able to keep up with the clan throughout this stage of the game. Being a bit nervous about gluing at first (i have a history with poor craft caused by hassles with glue), I was surprised when everything went well; especially since I was using Japanese paper, which can be hard to work with.
I haven't finished putting mine together yet but the next phase involves pasting the two end pages of the folio to the inside of the cover. After that I'm going to paste a sheet of red Canson over the inside of both cover pages in order to give the book a more contrasting/ dynamic feel. I definitely have to buy glue though, because I'm running out of Sobo and I wont have access to the studio's Yes Paste (and it takes a shit load of glue to do anything in the world of bookbinding).

Mosaics Group

In my English/Humanities class (which is called Mosaics for no reason), I am set to be part of a group project  dedicated to creating a PowerPoint which elaborates on the question: "Should Muslims be able to build their community center near ground zero?"- a current issue in downtown Manhattan.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20013655-503544.html
http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/pointcounterpoint-two-sides-of-the-ground-zero-mosque-debate/
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100822214609AAzeevY

Were supposed to display both sides of the argument, but I wonder if my rag-tag team has the ability to get past the obvious answer of "yes they can, the Muslim religion had nothing to do with 9-11, it was crazy terrorists who did it...besides Islam is all about peace and also innocent Muslims died too America is supposed to be a melting pot of cultures living in harmony etc.. " and actually present both sides with little bias. I fully agree with the idea that its OK to build the community center, but still I realize that my opinion isn't part of the assignment. Luckily, I'll be alright because my job specifically, is to find and quote the people's opinion (via online forums and such), I just worry about the team basing the rest of the presentation around their opinions. If we could just find a time where we could all meet up perhaps I could put put my worries to rest but are scheduals are all so different to the point that we might end up each doing a piece of the PowerPoint and sending it to one person to be put together.

Colour portrait

One of the two week long assignments for drawing this semester was a large scale self portrait. though it wasn't required the class had the option of drawing oneself without looking in the mirror at all. I utilized this to the fullest in half of the thumbnail drawing (done with oil pastels) as I drew one portait of myself (without looking in the mirror) facing another portait of myself (drawn while looking in the mirror). Apparently I don't know what I look like though because the portrait drawn from memory looks like a potato headed muppet.

(without mirror on the left)

For the large scale portrait I went back to the drawing board (..literally--hardy harr har). This time I depicted my self in bed in a cave (with chalk pastels); which I suppose at the time represented my lethargic attitude- spending too much time in my room sleeping or connected to headphones, trapped in a lazy stupor and severely separated from the outside environment.
As far as the method of drawing myself goes, I used a mirror, but very sparingly. This resulted in somewhat of a likeness of myself with some oddly exaggerated features.

book binding

Now that 2-d is coming to an end and there's no more sketchbooks to be completed (thank god! that was getting incredibly redundant to a point where it was causing every week to blend together), its time for the annual session of sketchbook binding. Our class was lead by pack leader Girard (whose named after the street I assume.....or visa-versa), who reimbursed the laws of successful bookbinding shown to us last semester.
Showing up slightly late to class foreshadowed my tendency to fall behind the rest of the class when stitching the signatures (folios, singular sketchbooks, folded paper, etc..), together--as far as i could tell I was the only one who had to take mine home to finish sewing.

After glueing Japanese paper over what became the spine I let the book dry over night only to find in the mourning that the book shifted, and the whole shebang is now oriented on a slant.

another photoshoporockism-->

This Photoshop assignment was all about fusing Photos with photos and photos and textures via lassos, clone stamps, etc... Ones goal I believe was to make a cohesive collage image.
This is the image I started with:

Then I fused my dog's face into the cliff side via clone stamp and this photo:

I think this part was pretty successful in that my dog's dog face somehow lined up with aspects of the cliff's cliff face pretty well, especially considering the fact that I didn't re-size either photo.

Next though I tried to incorporate scanned fabrics into the picture's foliage with the cut and paste lasso tool. I couldn't really get into it though, no successful groove was found. Rather then having a collage type feel, the trees just ended up looking like they where decorated with ghost farts and the grass was none too fresh either.

Anyways here it is:

Photoshopping

Basically the idea of this one was to scan an existing drawing into Photoshop, then use the paint brush tool on top of the image to create a digital drawing. I started off using a pen tablet (for the first time), which was cool because I could vary the line opacity and hardness by applying more or less pressure to the tablet. It was nice to be able to produce expressive lines on a computer screen; I'll have to try the tablet again soon.

Scanners and Illustraters

The assignment in which one scans their face and then uses the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to simplify it through sectioning off areas based on their color and then filling them in with their most prominent color.

As you can see mine has kind of a disconnected/pasted together look. To make this look more "arts and crafty" I scanned a piece of un-primed canvas into Photoshop; sharpened it, darkened it, and pasted it to a layer behind the face.

Break

I question why the past break is reffured to as spring break, since it won't be spring untill the 21st.
On a different note though (to the same tune of the previous sentence though, since the following is also in regards to spring break), this past spring break was not as fun as I had planned it to be. I started off at my parent's house in Connecticut, which was nice but since i no longer have a car and since their house is removed (it would take me a half hour to walk to the nearest bus stop, which is relatively inactive so I would probably spend an hour waiting for the bus, which would take an hour to get downtown because the route is meandering and full of stops and stoplights. If i had a car however, I could get downtown(not that there's anything to do downtown but its easier than dropping countless street names of where my friends live--I'm sure you understand.) in about 15 minutes, and have the option to go to the bank or stop at burger king on the way. Thats the problem with public transit, everything's got to be a fucking mission, one cant just roll out of bed into their car and then improvise from there) from the city in which I consider my stomping grounds (where my friends are), I spent most of that time alone. I spent most of the week days in Vermont visiting my sister at her school, which I thought would be fun but since it was during the week everyone their was working on assignments, so there was little fun to be had.
The remainder of the week was spent working, which transfers over to this week as I am now barraged by duedates to major assignments in every class. I've spent the last three nights working till about 4:00 and I'm about to do the same tonight and tomorrow. I might need another break soon- this time with a wad of cash, a 1960's Camaro, and the open road.

2-d

Although one can clearly see I'm hard at work over here, its not much work compaired to my 2-d Foundations class. Today i have been sleeping off the late nights spent on painting color charts, sketch book folio assignments, and starting up my second 2-d project.

The project is supposed to be a pattern based design, based on behavioral patterns. My selection was of my habbit of checking my pockets to make sure I didn't lose my phone, keys, or wallet (I do this constantly). I'm going to block print images of myself checking my pockets over a series of locations drawn in a sort of comic book format. I'm required to take a picture of my final product installed somewhere over spring break and I'm not quite sure how that's going to go.

olympics

This week was the week of the 3-d Olympics, a strange event held every year by the 3-D foundations professors. My class/team called ourselves the 13 Dimentions because there was thirteen of us (why else would we have come up with the 13 Dimentions), and our uniforms consisted of our custom made 13D shirts (provided by Sean) encompassed in a flannel shirt of our individual taste.

Upon arrival to the event (held in some sort of Ice-box-watchamawhatsit), our team was to introduce ourselves with a skit. Ours was very half-assed and poorly executed (an introduction was read, a banner with our team name written on it was held up, and we ran through it) because none of us cared much or put in much effort. In my opinion only a jackass would take an opening skit to the 3-D Olympics seriously.

Next our team was split into three demi-teams and sent our separate ways to work on one of three challenges.
My squad's challenge was to build some sort of puppet in 1 hour using the following materials:

Naturally, we started to build a giant monster complete with opening mouth and pinching claws.

Here it is in progress, the snout is based off the design of the stern of one of those canoes that is designed to be suitible for a small outboard or trolling motor (this notion never came up during the construction but I assume its what we were all thinking).

The completed monster was used in yet another skit in which the working claws grabbed teammate Kelly and dragged her into the working mouth (operated by yours truly). The performance was so realistic that I got a little spooked myself, I could only imagine how the audience felt.

 
Naturally, we won that round, killed it in fact. Our class won two out of three competitions yet did not win the whole competition, probably because of our opening skit. Fuck that, real heads know who the true champs are.

landscape

An assignment to be based upon our 2 previous assignments (a drawing of snow and a drawing of the sky); my drawing teacher gave the class the task of going out into the world, sketching something, and then doing anything and everything we wanted to it--getting buck wild, buck nasty, fucking it up, going bananas on the drawing. Aside from the size requirement of at least 4 ft in one direction, it was a very open ended assignment.

I first went out and sketched a local neighborhood at night. Then as directed by the preliminary assignment, I got buck nasty on it.

I wish I had gotten pictures of the sketches I did b4 I changed them because they were pretty good.

Then after a critique, I was onto the 4 ft drawing.

Phase 1: vine charcoal, compressed charcoal, and chalk pastel.

Phase 2: more chalk pastel, more and more.

Phase 3: completion with more chalk pastel, oil pastel in the foreground (to add texture, make it pop, give it some texture, give it the ol' salt n' peppa, give it some zazz, etc..), and the cropping of a few inches off the bottom (for composition's sake).

3-d

A few weeks ago, my classmate Sean and I teamed up for an intense assignment in our 3-d class. The challenge was to involve some sort of collision (or something that got the idea of a collision across)  into a giant inflatable sculpture. We ended up going off of Sean's idea of "Rock-Em Sock-Em Robots" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_%27Em_Sock_%27Em_Robots)and crated two giant robots that were to be set up in fighting stance and lit up by colored spotlights.

For those that don't know this^ is what the classic Rock-Em Sock-Em Robots looked like.

After an intense and lengthy measuring process we cut the basic shapes of the body parts out of a sheet of plastic.

We then began to connect the seams together with duct tape  which took many, many hours.

The final products ended up being roughly 8 feet tall. Although they were a bit top heavy I think they came out pretty good.

New Illustrater

I'm starting to get the hang of Illustrator; for class I made this floor plan of my current sleeping quarters:

Then, after a brief class lesson I felt spunky enough to make this quick logo using n outline of a Google Images eagle. I feel as though anything that comes up on the first 10 pages of a Google Image search should automatically not be copyrighted- just because they are bound to end up being copied and pasted and misappropriated.

I should have just used a blue similar to this for the large print, rather than Santa's pallet.

Illustrator

To kick off or first lesson on illustrator, the computer class was assigned drawings that were created out of various types of letter forms. My follow through was mostly about showing my competence with outlines, transforming lines and letters, among other techniques--I wouldn't consider any of it eye candy.

a Phrase

a pattern..... I assumed that the composition would cut off at the end of the page I was working on, yet all of the unwanted extra bits remain un-cropped; I'll have to inquire about a solution next class. For now picture this fitting into an 8"by 10" frame (or some ratio of that depending on the size in which your monitor displays this image) with the sides being cut off in a way that makes it look like a cool patern and not just a row of A's.

  This one was to be done with minimal usage of the computer mouse- Ideally without using the mouse at all.

Same problem here as with the pattern-- the b and g to the right were thought to have been discarded.

Mosaics

Lately I've been spending a lot of time working on an intense group project for my 3d class. Its because of this that I have been slacking on my reading of The Iliad in my English class. This class is setup in a way so that the lectures transcend group discussions based on questions about the reading. One can see where I'm going with this classic high school type scenario--I was called upon to answer a question about Odyssius. Luckily I have seen the movie the Odyssey (when i was 7), so I was able to concoct a convoluted half mumbled half rambled answer based on that.
I was woried after though, because I remembered from Latin Class in high school (this all could have been avoided if I had gotten higher grades in Latin--I would be much more familiar with the story. In fact my Latin class may or may not have translated the entire story--I wouldn't know because I never participated or did homework)...that Ulysses was the captain from the Odyssey. I was convinced that my professor didn't correct me because he wanted me to look foolish.
After a trip to wikipedea though, I was reminded that Ulysses is meerly the Latin name for Odyssius.
So basically what i learned from the Mosaics lecture is that Latin class does in fact help you later in life (or at least it could if you pay attention).

Photoshop

To go along with the theme of our previous routine assignment, our class' introduction to photoshop was followed with the task of grafting our photos with scans of various objects. It was pretty cut and dry for me because I didn't explore many new areas of photoshop and because what was new to me was pretty easy to get the hang of.

Here's the jump drive I purchased from the staples downtown.

A scanned closeup of two of my new brushes, the very same ones hat can be spotted in this photo--interesting stuff....

And finally, my essential tools for getting through the last assignment and future assignments too; my camera and computer.


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Abroad

Being that I've never really thought about studying abroad, today's Foundations lecture could have been a useful tool for making a decision on how to spend  future year here at school.
About a minute or two into the presentation I realized that I never thought about studying abroad for a reason--it doesn't appeal to me at all. Speakers discussed studio type environments in Rome and Japan and I just couldn't get into it. Don't get me wrong, if someone handed me tickets to Japan or Rome I'd hop all over the opportunity, but it would be to get away from doing work ("relaxation"). That's what traveling is more about for me, actually getting a chance to see a new place and not just at bars after work either; that's not shit to me. I'm somewhat "O.C.D." (maybe just overly curious) about learning my surroundings, weather it be by foot or car I'm always going to be looking for something (or nothing) to get into. This is why the slides of students busy at work in the depths of a studio made me think "what a waste of a vacation--traveling so far away to do the same shit I'm doing right now."
By the end of the seminar I was setting a personal record for the most awkward position I've ever fallen asleep in-- an extreme slouch in my chair with the lower 75% of my back lying flat on my chair and my legs straight out in the aisle. The top of my torso was propped upright by the back of my chair while my backpack acted as a blanket. I awoke in a daze when people started to trip over my feet.

Next Day

The next morning- I got up early to create these past posts.

....but of course I continued to slack off first.

End of Day

"Getting tired, gunna fall asleep soon"  .....is probably what I was thinking.

How else would a day end?

Same Old Story pt. 2

Was trying to come up with concept sketches for an upcoming art project--ended up doodling instead as usual. Ended up comparing the many similarities of lobsters and scorpions.

just buggin'...

Same old story

Same old dinner--convenience and flavor are negatively correlated.

7-11 coffee+a bunch of different coffee mixers+ cup= cup of hot garbage

yes it was that bad

"GET-R-DONE"

:(

came home to find this ugly mug hanging on the wall of my living room.

 
This is a lady that I'd like to see less of.

This one I don't mind


Meanwhile in my nook of the appt.:

I'd like to make time to clean this crap pile

...thoroughly.