My favorite so far!

Today in class we chose between several still lives of clothing hung up on the wall. This is the first drawing I have done I am truly proud of. I think for the first time I really captured the volume of the objects. Hooray for progress!

More Plants

In the next class we continued drawing plants but this time we could choose between using graphite and charcoal. I chose charcoal! It turned out much more of a success than the graphite one. I especially like how the wood grain turned out.

Plant Life

I haven't found a spare moment for blogging recently so I'm about to post three drawings at one time. This first one is from a week or so ago. My drawing teacher collected a bunch of clippings and plants from Monroe Park in downtown Richmond and brought them in for us to draw. One of the most challenging parts in drawing the still life was that the plants were not so still. Within 30 minutes they had all drooped and changed positions. So in the end the plant did not look my drawing but rather what it looked like at the beginning of the three hour studio class. The other major challenge with this piece was using graphite. I am not very confident using graphite yet, the paper bag post earlier in the year was the first graphite drawing I had ever done--making this the second!

The Steamboat

For the last couple days I've been working on a project for my space research class in which we were required to use at least 8 linear feet of wood to make a wooden sculpture with at least 20 doweled joints. It was so fun to use all the nice saws and equipment VCU's wood shop has available. At some point in the middle of constructing my sculpture I started to see some (very abstract) resemblances to a ship. Hence, I have titled it "The Steamboat." Can you see it?

Candy still life

Today we made our own still lives out of candy. I used twizzlers, a marshmallow, and a jujube. The twizzlers were hard to work with because they kept breaking and unwinding so I would have to alter the drawing or try and remember how it was before. It was all fun though, drawing is growing on me!

Drawing- in class

The focus of the first month or so of my drawing studio class is still-life charcoal drawing. Drawing is still difficult for me but I think I may have made some progress since I started a couple weeks ago. I enjoy working with charcoal; I love when my hands are black at the end of a class. :-) This drawing was fun because there was such a variety of surfaces to draw: the toilet paper, the metal..thing, the leather on top of it, and the painted wooden cube.

More drawing

For my drawing studio class our homework assignment was to draw a hard object and a soft object. For various reasons, I am extremely tired and kind of sick feeling today. I woke up from a broken (by classes) day-long nap to do this assignment so I expected them to be worse than my usual so-so drawings..but for some unexplained reason they turned out ok! Maybe I should start sleeping all day everyday! ;-)

How to Make a Dance Party (Chain Reaction)

In my Space Research class we have been working on a chain reaction for the past week or so. What the reaction creates--a dance party! This was a really fun project. It was based off of Peter Fischli and David Weiss' chain reaction film.
The whole video is about 20 minutes long, we watched it on the first day of class. Here's a clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXrRC3pfLnE

We also watched the Honda Cog commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo&NR=1&feature=fvwp

And lastly, an OK Go music video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w&feature=related

Using those videos as inspiration, our assignment was to create a chain reaction as a class. We each had to think of a step to contribute and coordinate with the person before and after us in the reaction to make sure they would work together. I volunteered to film and edit the video for the class. Just like Fischli and Weiss' video, there are a few obvious edits. It was really tough to get each step to cooperate!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1uE4GnJ_FE