Little Painting on the Prairie

This next painting is my self identity piece. It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to do. I came up with some sketches inspired by a couple of different artists though. The first is a Russian artist, Anna Berezovskaya. I loved the juxtaposition of the subject matter under the skirt verses the scene. My teacher introduced me to Stephanie Frostad. I have seen her work before, and it is super cool! I love her pieces and how they are very stylized. The shading and way she renders the figures and fabric is impeccable! She is also a Montanan artist! If you would like to see her work follow this link to her website.

I had fun with this piece. I found trying to paint people is very difficult. (I still hate them hehe) We had a shortened critique this time so my comments are few. Every one commented that the piece has the same feeling as the last one. Once again I heard that it looks like social realism paintings from the 20's. It was also said that there is an interesting contrast between the movement of the landscape and the stillness of the woman. They loved how it seemed that the winds of the prairie were sweeping the city into the skirt. You can also check out my pinterest board of inspiration to see what my brain was thinking HERE!

Here is a sneak peak at the painting I am working on right now

Is It Nap Time Yet?

Wow does time fly! Even when your sleep deprived! But isn't that the purpose of college to teach us that sleep is not a necessity of life? Or that blogging takes priority over studying for french..... oh well!

Today I learned though that art is important and that the world pretty much depends on us. We had a very special guest today at the college, Don Colley! He is an artist from Chicago. He was really inspirational and really cool. He showed us some techniques on how he sketches and shared some really great advice. He said, "sketching is thinking out loud" I had never really thought of that before, but it makes perfect sense! He is a really neat guy! check out some of his work, or his video by faber-castell!

 So I have not posted in ages which means I have been hard at work on projects for school! Here are some of the cooler projects! My first graphic project was a success! We were to create bit-mat monograms in adobe illustrator, which was a piece of cake! We had to mount our designs on mat board and they had to be presented perfectly.

Up next on the update is my painting projects! Our first project was to do a grid painting with a specific color scheme. I had analogous colors, red, yellow, and orange. We are supposed to make our own black in my painting class so thats how I ended up with the green color, the black I make has a ton of blue in it. We were supposed to pick a silhouette and use a 12X12 to cube-ify it. soooooo ya ta-da! Pretty wheat! We were to show depth by using the varying colors shades. Darker colors stand out more while lighter colors recede to the back. 

And finally may I present my first still life. We were supposed to render a still life in gray scale to study lighting and how far we can push the contrast between dark and light. I used oil paint and my own black so it has a blue-ish hue. I also used a pallet knife so the painting is full of texture! It was a really fun study! 

Back Into the Swing of School

My how time flies! To bad I'm not having a marvelous time! It's college time once again! Break out the overpriced books, late nights, and coffee comas! A friend and I the other day at lunch decided college is really those days you can't get back because it takes 20 years off your life from stress!

But this year is fun if i use my optimistic attitude! I'm taking a painting studio and intro graphics studio! I'm also taking French, art history, and a human and life development class(FCS)!

The FCS class is pretty awesome! The purpose of the class is to learn about humans development from conception till death, so we do the whole flour baby kind of project, but its a computer game instead! This is the only time we will ever be allowed to leave our kids alone for two weeks. The other part of the class we create our own avatars and raise them from 18 to a ripe ol age when we kill em off. Oh this is gonna be fun!

I love my painting and graphics class because duh they're art classes! It's great hanging out in the studio till 3 am again.... oh the memories.... coffee....

french is french! Im not failing yet so thats a plus!

Well it will be a busy year! I'm almost half way there!

Let the Everyday Adventures Begin!

Capstone Drawing: Progression of Emotions

Like other art classes, at the end of the semester means, chaos, stress, and capstone final projects. These projects are supposed to be examples of your creative capabilities (which hopefully you have some left by the end) and also skills acquired throughout the semester. For our drawing final we were instructed that we needed a set of three drawings We had the freedom to draw whatever anyway we wanted to. I decided to use charcoal, and draw figures. I hated figures before, but for some reason I had this ridiculous idea to have figures be my subject for my capstone! Maybe I drank to much coffee and felt super confident when I wrote my proposal paper, cause I have no idea what I was thinking! There is a reason why I never posted a picture of my self portrait. I hate drawing humans. dumb humans. Anyway I have included some parts from my capstone proposal so you can understand the inspiration from the pieces.

The capstone project I propose is that of a personal journey of strong emotions and growing up. It is a reflection on my personal emotional history. The first drawing is of a little girl’s hands clasped within a father’s hands. The next sketch shows a self-portrait of a bent head and outstretched hand. Last is the third sketch that shows a close up of eyes peaking out behind fingers and the gesture for quite. I also am inspired by the realism paintings of Honore Daumier. His paintings have a very sketchy characteristic to them. I was inspired by the boldness of his actions and how he was not afraid to stand and speak his mind through his art. He often exposed the un-glamorous side of life that many people in France at that time were trying to avoid. To me his paintings and prints have a lot of feeling and emotions packed into them. I wish to do the same in my progression of drawings.

Gift Wrapped Skeletons

For our final individual projects in my 3D class we were faced with building a structure using linear and planar materials to make a dynamic design that utilizes an interior structure

(skeleton) to create an exterior form (skin). The pieces had to have a transparent skin, windows for viewing the inside (which had to be a different design from the outside), and show our understanding of compression and expansion. 
We first built structures from straws to get a sense of what forms we hoped to render. From there we moved on to use balsa wood to build our sculptures. In the beginning I felt this project was going to be easy, and maybe even fun. I was wrong. I hate sculpture. Hate is a strong word. I hate sculpture. It may have to do with the fact I hate math. A lot. There is a reason I am an art student. I can't spell and I can't do math. To give you some perspective on how awful I truly am at math, it took me three hours to build a Hexagon! THREE HOURS! That's why I hate sculpture. And so I survived countless hours piecing this structure together which questioned my patience and what I had ever done to deserve such unfair treatment. I sure did have some bad karma with this one! but avail, like a gazillion hours later I finally finished the sculpture!!!

Naked sculpture

College Home Cookin'

 Boy am  I smart or What! I feel as if I have leaped over culinary perceptions of college cooking! I have discovered a super yummy way to make something like spaghetti, that tastes like spaghetti O's, within the realm of my very own dorm room. [cue dramatic music]

It is a big deal.

For all you people to fancy or who have the ability to actually buy real groceries let me introduce you to ramen a very cheep meal, and beside it is western family tomato soup another cheep contender in today's experiment. 

The Never Ending Drawing

 10 hours is a long time. Especially if you spend 10 hours on one drawing!

That was our latest assignment in our drawing class was to spend at least 10 hours on our still life. That's 10 hours dealing with the joys of charcoal (I hope you could tell I was being sarcastic), 10 hours of squinting at a still life, 10 hours of frustration, 10 hours of stress, 10 hours of pure anger (people kept changing our still life, they better hope we never find who they were).

But 10 hours is really not that much to spend on a drawing that you want to do really well on, and we jam out to music in studio so 10 hours isn't probably as bad as it first seems!

So to begin our still life's we had to choose a spot, I gravitated towards the little piccolo. I have a soft spot for the instrument since I used to play it in high school!

Some of my sketches

Little Black Blobs

How busy can you get? SUPER DUPER busy that's how much!

And so to get back into the swing of blogging I present our new 3D project!

We had to construct modules to create one big form. The project was called, design between the folds.

we had to create a 3D form constructed from many multiples of a singular modular design or “unit”. The unit had to be created from paper and include some type of “fold” in its construction. The final form had to have an exterior surface texture that was different from its interior texture. 

And so we played with lots of concepts and lots of paper. We saved so many trees this past month.... not. Art school uses paper like smokers use cigarettes! 

After murdering countless innocent trees our projects were finally done! 

2D transformed into 3D

Today finally was the day that we critiqued our project we have been working on for weeks in 3D. The project took forever (ok so like three weeks) but it turned out really great! Our piece was based upon geometric planes, we were supposed to create a 3-dimensional design based upon a map marked out by points.

Our first step was to pick a location that had some meaning to us, lots of people picked the places they grew up, or went to school. I choose France!!!! I miss it a lot and had an amazing time there. The specific location I chose was the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery. I have relatives who manage the cemetery there. The country side was so beautiful and moving and to hear stories from my relatives about the cemetery and people who come to visit, and then to even find Montana guys buried there really "changed" me I think. Oh and they have wheat fields in France that was pretty epic too! All the farm land, and the tiny little towns all over really reminded me of home!

Back in school I first printed out my map from google.

And Then I proceeded to cut out a shape by plotting points that had significance to my adventure! Some points were, a spot I almost got ate by a deer on a walk, another was the old farm I walked to, a field I took pictures of, a Montana guys grave, my relatives house, and ect.

Happy Birthday To Me!

Happy Birthday to me! Say what??????????
This is one interesting story to say the least.

For the weekend I drove to Billings, MT to visit my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and cousins, annnnnnnd to watch my High School Speech team compete at State! It was an awesome weekend hanging out with my grandma, shopping, and loading up on coffee :)

I very surprisingly made it to the small town of Worden for the first two rounds saturday at 8:30. YUCK. There is a reason why college kids sleep all day, we are not meant to get up early and for that fact I don't think anybody is meant to! Its not fun to get up at the crack of dawn, guess thats why they invented coffee!

I got to watch one of the girl's speeches and then watched a hum duo (humorous duet) skit! They were  soooooo funny! It was fun to see the girls at state they obviously had to work hard to get there! Speech and Drama is really awesome you get to know amazing people! From Speech and Drama I know Miss Alexis Wineman, who was just crowned Miss America's Choice! I also know a girl who is going to be on American Idol.  I know tons of other people who will probably be super successful and have already showcased the amazing potential that they have!

Then today was my birthday.... but not really....

I went out to lunch with some of my relatives at the Olive Garden (which is the best restaurant!!!). Their food is soooooooooooo goooooood. It was at the end of our meal that the table next to us had a birthday gig, so they got a cake and sang happy birthday it was super cute. And the Cake was too! It looked sooooo yummy! And so my Aunt's lightbulb just about exploded when she turned around from looking at the very tempting cake and very seriously said, "lets get that!". Well it was a great idea except it was none of our birthday's. Would that stop her? Sheesh of course not! And so she decided it was my birthday. As she ordered the cake we were all kinda looking at each other ready to start laughing. I couldn't almost hold it in! And of course when the waitress brought it they all sang happy birthday. Cool does this mean I'm already 20!? I had a cake that makes it official right???

It was super good

But its not my birthday....

Oh well, who cares!

LET THEM EAT CAKE! 

To Draw or Not To Draw

Who draws shoes and pillows? Me that's who! Over our extended break we were assigned to draw our pillow and a shoe....
So that's what I did.

I started with setting up a pillow and my favorite shoes! Say hello to VERA WANG!!!!!! I love these shoes so much the box even came to college with me even though I probably don't have the room for it... Oh well its Vera Wang!  Another thing that's probably not smart is working until the hours of morning day light... whoopsy! That's college for ya!

Feelin Like A Degas....

Awesome, crazy, stressful, blah, sleepy, hyper, ow, and Go! All are adjectives to describe my day.  My day started out with the dire need of caffeine... aka art history at 8 a.m.
In the early a.m. we learned about the Medicis' of Italy. But if I learned anything from history class in high school, other than politics, it was the Medicis'.

Afterwards was my forever long three hour drawing studio. (How was I going to make it through the day without coffee!?)
But It turned out to be awesome!!!!! (even without the coffee) We learned about gestural drawing.  We set up easels in a circle and everyone took turns modeling in the middle. We started sketching for two minuets and worked down all the way to five seconds to sketch! We were all on edge by the end. Our teacher called it drawing boot camp. The purpose of this exercise was to kinda re-learn how to draw. Usually people start with an outline and work in. We needed to start from the inside and try to avoid outlining too much. Our teacher also told us to hold out pencils like cavemen.... that didn't work so well...

Some Tim Tebow Action up top!

 Otherwise it was super fun! My teacher was super impressed with my sketches! So studying all those Degas sketches finally paid off! But somehow amongst all the fun I sliced open my finger.... I don't know how but good thing I noticed my finger puddling blood before I got it on my sketches! Yay for pretty sketches!

Back to School Kids

The smell of school is in the air, too bad its not the smell of summer. Today classes started, and I got to start my day off with and 8'o clock class. yippy. But art history seems like it will be a lot of fun this semester! I am excited for all the European art! Once we get to french impressionistic art I will truly love this class!

Today I also had my drawing class, we had to draw portraits of the person sitting next to us. Well my poor partner resembled more of that of a bug than a human being....

*Warning*

this next paragraph has been dedicated to outrageous expense of college books and supplies 

And so this morning I, and quite a few of my fellow art classmates discovered the wonderful fact that we do in deed have to buy another stinking art history book. Volume II. wasn't all 1000 pages of Volume I enough? Do I really need to spend another $115 on an art history book? why couldn't we just use the one from last semester like we did for our fundamentals class!?!? Are we not killing enough trees! If we are going to kill trees you think we would put it towards a better use that TEXT BOOKS! And whatever happened to "you can't put a price on education" hmmmmmmmm?????? And then I have to buy all new supplies for 3D and my drawing class. ODE TO JOY, more art stuff that's just what I need, stuff I will use one time and then have sit there on my desk forever! (well until I move out)

You may now proceed with caution.

Then I was called to the office. It seems like my job is starting to swallow all my time..... hmmmmm. But I'm working over my scheduled time, so lots gets done!

Today I finally gave in to Pinterest. People kept asking me if I was on Pinterest. I also keep hearing, "found it on Pinterest" "oh ya I saw that on Pinterest" "I waste all my time on Pinterest." So I finally had to find what Pinterest was all about.To be honest I really don't get how it is different from stumbleupon or weheartit. Oh well maybe it will get cooler. 

Returning To The Perils Of Dorm Life

On Sunday the dorms once again were open, we as students who pay a huge fee for staying in these things in the first place get kicked out during holidays.... arg. Anyway I moved in finally! It was nice to return to my cramped communal living quarters once again to look forward to a new semester of art and stress! Can you hear the excitement?

But to add some more character to my dorm room, I got this cute little piece of art for Christmas from my mom! It was so cute!

Another thing on the bright side of life was the fact we got sushi today at work!!! how awesome is that!!!! But on the flip side it was because it was my boss's going away party :(  We all got a tad emotional, we almost had to break out the tissue boxes! 

And next a fun fact from college life. The travel mugs we recive for living in the dorms aren't just swell for filling with liquids they are great for smuggling things out of the dinning halls! So what is orange all over and three can fit in my mug? ORANGES! The tiny ones that is! I was kinda proud of my discovery!

Speech & Drama and the Adventures of Hogwarts

Cat but no hat

I hope you feel intimidated by the picture of this cute kitty, as he stares out at you from your computer screen. Kitty knows all.

Except Speech & Drama. Kitty doesn't know about that, so I guess that means I better inform you of how the meet went in Manhattan! 

The day started out bright and early. yuk. I had forgotten how early we used to get up for meets. ew. We sprang from our beds and sped off to the meet! The girls had super hard competition, but they did very well.

Memorized Public Address
Speech from a high-school graduation speech

Expository Speech on the band Queen

Expository Speech on Street Art

Memorized Public Address
Speech from JFK's inaugural speech

After the meet we all crashed from exhaustion, but then energized our poor bodies with coffee and the excitement of a Harry Potter Marvelous Movie Marathon! Well we only watched the last 3 but that is still a lot of hours of English accents!

My coach and her accomplices very funnily put this on my Facebook.... there will come a day when revenge will be mine! -did I mention in the post they hoped I would make it into slytherin...

The time I got to spend with the speech team, and my great and wonderful mischievous friends made it a really great weekend. It was great to support these kids, they work hard and I am very proud of them and my coach, did I mention she is super-woman!?

Did I also mention I am the favorite?

*We have a tradition on our team that the coach picks a favorite, then all of team-mates fight over who the favorite really is.

Im sure theres a spell to make me the favorite forever.... 

Oie Not Much More Needs to be Said

Wow what a day! Work was crazy!

I was a hand model and a graphic designer! We had a student photographer come in to take pictures for a new division, and I got to tag along to demand my opinion and command with authority.... hahah not exactly, but almost! Then after an hour in the outdoors and freedom of the sunshine I once again returned to the dungeon of my closet office. I kinda feel like poor Harry Potter all cooped up. And so It was an intense day but hope came! My friend who is also a graphic design freshman returned! So part of the work load got dumped on her!!!! YAY!

I tried to pdf a brochure for the thousandth time and it printed all funky, which resulted in me just about having a heart attack!!! but I re-pdf-ed it, and all was fine! There was peace throughout the land once again! AKA I finally got to finish eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

Turns out you can use plastic bags as plates.... even for multiple days....being cheep is very creative....so is being an art student....I like dots...I don't think I have anything else to say...lame...

Until now! I finally made my way to Three Forks! After kinda loosing my way in the dark by taking a wrong turn my GPS finally found the way after I turned it on and off about five times!

Anyway.... I finally made it to my friends house to get-together with my ol' speech team from high school! It was great to see the kids and my old coach! (she's pretty awesome!) Her sister (who's house we were staying at) even made a  birthday cake for the twins on our team!

Twins! :) Happy Birthday!

Janna's amazing chocolate cake!

Meow

Meow Meow

The adventures continue tomorrow at the speech meet!

Advice From an Art School

It is finally all done!!!! well almost....
This morning at the wonderful hour of eight O'clock poor little me had to walk across the perils of icy campus to a exciting Art History exam, but the hope and light at the end of the tunnel that guided me through this horrible experience was ITS  OUR LAST ONE! -except part two of the art history course is next semester.... oh well!
After the excitement of being tested on Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which included my favorite cathedral, the Reims Cathedral! (I got to see it in France while I was there, creepy angel....!!!!) Next was our 2D recitation. Mr. Dean of course had a great lecture we learned all kinds of really great facts about life.

"Wear different shoes every day, they are the most important, so invest money in good shoes!"

Oh yessir my art professor told us this, of course he meant so you don't have back problems and what not, but I kind of interpreted it a little different... :) He then taught us how we should wash our hair, manage our time, fall in love, take risks, have confidence, and then the best lesson of all, don't get herpes.

"You can get herpes anywhere, from hand rails, doorknobs, shouldn't have this been on national television like everyday!"

When Dean was a grad student some med student mis-diagnosed him with herpes cause he had a corneal scratch and they figured it was from herpes, but it wasn't so he was just fine. But Dean made sure we all understood that we shouldn't touch our eyes so we don't get herpes! Gotta love Art School!

But alas I am glad this week is starting to wind down! It has been crazy studying for a final and working on my capstone. My dorm room totally looks like an artsy fartsy tornado ripped through here! But I still have a math final next week (which is the real finals week...). So ready for this semester to be done and move on to a new one!

And so I am finally posting about my capstone project! So what we had to do was listen to a sound on ubu.com. But these songs are not normal songs they are super messed up theres screaming and scratching and banging on pots, just really odd stuff. But I found one called tri-cello which is kind normal. So anyway I mapped out the entire 9 minute song in 30 second increments  whew that took forever! Next I painted on watercolor paper with gouache, I used salt to add dimension and interest, and then covered the entire thing in a veil of sheer black fabric! The whole thing turned out to be about 12 feet long! But it was very worth it! 

In the process of making the 12 foot monster

up on the wall in the studio

We experimented with the lighting :)

And Then There Was Two

Well its been awhile, but things are busy! Especially since I got another job. Yuppers I now have two part time jobs!!! Lets see how long this takes my parents to realize.... tehe this could get interesting!
 And maybe this will motivate me to finally find the bank in town so I cash all this dough I'm making! haha right......

A friend of mine works at this really cool carmel factory, and she has been bragging about how awesome her job is, and then she mentioned that they were hiring extra people for the holidays.

Light bulb moment!
I like caramels, and I like money! And so I tried it out the other day, and the boss lady was impressed she said I was a natural at wrapping caramels! haha oie ain't I just proud :)

But my friend was right it is a really fun job the people are really nice and it is surprisingly fun to wrap caramels for hours upon end!

Then meanwhile at my other job, I discovered I hate the word Wednesday with a passion. Thats right I do not just dislike it, I plain old hate it!!!! I hate it because I can't spell it. I can promise you If this thing didn't have spell check you could only read it if you understood old english from the times they spelled things phonetically!

Anyway the art project over the week(s) has been my capstone project, which is kinda a big deal. What we have to do is take a sound and put it on paper! So I've been hard at work, I'll post some pictures later!

One More Art Assignment Down

Wow it has been so busy! The weeks are flying by I can't believe this semester is almost over! Jumping from class to work to dance I have hardly found time to blog... whoopsy. So finally after sculpting class was cancelled because of this.

SNOW!!!

I am now finding the time to write this!
This week our assignment for 2D was to take pictures that showed contrast between natural organic elements and human or man-made structures. We could do part of the assignment in Photoshop which totally made my day, week, and almost year! My teacher probably thinks I'm super weird cause I was so excited when he said I could use it!

The three pictures I choose from the left, a power line at sunrise in Beijing China,  the gardens at Versailles France, and  the last one is an old chair in one of our wheat fields. 

To begin the project I manipulated the pictures in photoshop into  simple black and white sketches that showed the positive and negative space. Then I had to transfer them onto bristol board. Ode to joy. I am sick of bristol board and markers gah!!!!! But thankfully this was our last project that involved the stuff! I traced the images very carefully which made my eyes hurt from staring at these things for so long,  but the result was fantastic!

My tools :)

during the process of tracing 

This project gave me a headache! ah so many lines!

But they look pretty in the end!

....Coming soon Capstone! The final project of 2D is on its way!