Da fluffies

Last week I took a break from working on a project for a client as part of my Illustration class in order to spend two nights drawing something completely different for myself. Basically, I needed a confidence boost. Something that I've realized now that I'm back at school and taking a couple art classes again is that I really enjoy learning about art, but I really hate being graded on it. I put enough pressure on myself when I draw that the added pressure from having a professor's critical voice running through my head at the same time is not super conducive to creating my best work. The useful critique comes afterward, or at defined stages in the process--not through every mark, which is where my critical thoughts have a habit of showing up. I'm kind of looking forward to showing my homework project to the clients though. Either they like it or they don't or they like someone else's better. I can work with that a lot better than: "If that ink smears now he'll give me a C, my GPA will drop, I'll lose my scholarships and have to drop out of college...." Ha. Like I said, I put a lot of pressure on myself. Bad habit, that.

So with a new sketchpad and new pens I had some fun with a giant, a shepherd and his sheep. It's not the greatest illustration, but as a starting place I'm proud of it.

How I got to the above image:
1. I drew several small, ugly doodles for a while to arrive at a concept and some ideas about composition. This is the least ridiculous-looking one in which you can at least kind of tell what I was trying to do....You may ignore my Algorithms homework. It has nothing to do with sheep.

2. I drew the illustration full-size in pencil.

3. After drawing, erasing and re-drawing all that the paper got too dirty to erase completely and look good in ink. I took a fresh sheet of paper and traced lightly over the outlines.

4. Then the rest is all pen-work. Hatching, crosshatching, stippling, any kind of mark to suggest some texture. Erase the pencil, scan it, smile.

Summer Sketches

In my last post I said I'd share some of the drawings I've been doing lately. Here are my favorites so far:

Small doodle, no photo reference. The way I exaggerated the proportions makes the horse remind me more of a Western cow pony than a medieval mount, but it was fun.

Self portrait. I don't draw these very often but this one turned out well.

This one is based somewhat loosely on a photo I took of a friend.

This is my horse Paladin. Horses are so expressive, and they have such big personalities, but sometimes that doesn't show up very well in photos of them. So even though this is just a sketch, and not even a very complete-looking one, I'm thrilled that I got his personality to show through here where it doesn't really in the photo. However, I'm still not happy with the rider. A better reference might have helped. This drawing shows me I need to put in more hours of practice drawing figures to get them up to the same level as my equines before they'll start working better together.

Vegetables and Bible stories (random) and moving a mountain

©Big Idea Entertainment, LLC.

I might not be as cool as some people who can say they own all the Veggie Tales movies and I can't even say I've watched them all either. But it struck me recently that vegetables telling Bible stories has to be one of the weirdest things ever. I mean, who came up with that idea? "Let's combine two things kids don't care that much about and make it entertaining!" Or maybe that's really how someone got their kids to eat their vegetables. Maybe they had a mini vegetable theater going on at the dinner table.

So then I got to thinking "I've got to try that someday!" It would go something like this:

"One day Carrot Elijah was walking along a road when these young peas started pestering him. They teased him and teased him until he got really fed up of it and cursed them. Now there were also a couple big bears in the area. Can you give me your best bear impression? Wow that was a very scary roar. Good job. And the bears came along and ate up those mean peas. Go on, eat them. Eat. Them. Elijah says you must."

I told you this post was random.

Anyway, I finished the school year and am back home, facing the less-than-thrilling tasks of unpacking and finding a job. I've also been attempting to complete at least one little doodle every day and so far that's been fun. Once I set up my scanner I'll post some.

In the meantime, here's a picture of my final project from my Beginning Painting class. I was working from a photo, most likely taken by my sister, of the Trim Castle moat (Trim, Ireland).

I'm not completely done with it. During critique I was convinced to add more highlights to the stones and darken the sky a bit. I also need to cover where some of the paint unfortunately got scratched sometime between finishing it and taking this picture. (If you can't see the scratch, it's because this picture is very small. It's much more noticeable in person, as this painting is 30" wide.)

I am really happy with it though. From the start my goal was to paint a landscape to replace the relatively ugly painting of Mt. Rainier I had to do way back in fifth grade. That one, my first real acrylic painting and the one I got pretty heavily ridiculed for by the art teacher, my parents have kept hanging prominently in our living room ever since, despite my requests that it be relocated somewhere out of sight. Maybe for a fifth grader it's not completely hideous, but when there's a very nice landscape painted by my great-grandmother hanging on the opposite wall, and all that art teacher's criticisms ringing in my head, it just looks bad. So for me this is hello favorite castle, goodbye bad memories.

News and the tale of a troublesome timepiece

Hello there! I hope you're having a lovely day.

I’m in the midst of my last three weeks of school and life’s been very busy. As in, busier than normal busy, and I grew up in a household where not being busy was pretty much a crime. Which perhaps explains a lot about my lifestyle but I digress.

Here’s the quick update on some of the good news:

• Art news: This drawing made it into the annual juried art show of student work at my school, which was exciting, so I took a picture of it hanging in the gallery. Spiffy, huh?
  
  
  
  
  It was also chosen to go into a second art show as well. This one was an event put on by some Business majors to raise funds for an organization called FISH (Friends In Service to Humanity) that provides food and clothing to anyone who needs it. I went and looked around for a bit at their set up, noticing that the space was rather dark for viewing art. The next bit was priceless. When I chatted with one of the girls there she said: “Oh, I liked yours! I moved it into better lighting so people could see it a little better. It was a little farther back but I moved it forward so now--oh the lights aren’t on.”
  
  Lastly, the charcoal drawing I did of the knights/chess set/stuff went through a couple rounds of judging and made it into the school's annual design publication, which was expanded to include studio artists this year. Once it's printed I can say I'm a published artist! (I'm not sure when that will be or if it's already out yet. I think they told me April when I asked before, but that was a long time ago.)


• Computer Science news (that's my major, in case I haven't already mentioned that): I was one of fifty CS/CE students in the country to be invited to a special event at Microsoft’s world headquarters (they call it a Golden Ticket, but I didn’t get any chocolate), so I’ll be flying to Seattle this week to spend a couple days with their programmers and engineers and see if I can get an internship or something. Better yet, I’ll get a chance to go home afterwards to celebrate my dad’s birthday before flying back to school.

All in all it’s been pretty exciting to see how God’s been opening doors for me, even though walking through them has meant some extra work and extra stress. I’m also relearning the importance of finding time to stop, relax, and listen to Him again instead of all the other things roaring in my mind. Te aseguro, esto no es fácil.

Speaking of time, I lost quite a bit of it to my watch of all things last week. Last Tuesday, the battery died while I was at work. (There’s a great feeling that comes from checking how much longer I have to spend in the office before I’m free to go eat dinner, only to see a blank display.) Wednesday, after spending approximately 24 annoying hours periodically glancing at my watchless wrist, I walked to the nearest store--Walgreens--to try to find a new battery. Unfortunately, I did not know what kind of battery my watch needed, because the manufacturer had secured the backplate with four teeny tiny screws that none of my screwdrivers were small enough to get off. So after staring hopelessly at all the different sizes of watch batteries on the wall I bought the smallest set of screwdrivers I could find in the store, plopped down on a bench outside and went to work trying to get those stupid screws undone.

I got three of the four off.

The last one was even more stubborn than me. No amount of twisting or prying was getting anywhere as it was just too small and stiff for my screwdriver. With the skies darkening and frustration mounting I walked home, where, of course, I kept trying and kept failing.

Saturday was my next chance to get away from school. It was a nice, sunny day even so I rode my bike the mile to Fred Meyer. Amazing, really, considering every other time I’ve tried to ride my bike this year it’s either had flat tires that refused to inflate or it’s made scary rattling/clanking/squeaking/other noises. (Yet, whenever I check on it not intending to actually ride it, it’s perfectly fine....) Although it still makes weird noises...but they weren’t so loud this time that I couldn’t ignore them ;).

I took my watch to the jewelry department and told the lady what I needed. She went to work a bit unenthusiastically (I think I’d interrupted her just as she was trying to start a conversation with her co-worker). After a couple minutes she said, “You know, I can’t get this screw off either.” Great. Based on her obvious annoyance that I had dared call on her to do her job, I thought she’d give up then and I’d be stuck. But eventually she got it, changed the battery and took my money, letting me set it on my own.

Silly me didn’t set it right then and there. I had other things on my mind at that point and wanted to leave as fast as possible since I’d already spent a fair bit of time doing other shopping and I really don’t like being in stores that long. I went home and discovered that two of the three buttons on my watch no longer worked, making it impossible to set anything.

So Sunday after church I was back on my bike (light rain this time, not quite so warm) and headed to the store. The lady there this time was friendlier, but still not very enthusiastic about dealing with my watch, saying things like “This is why we aren’t supposed to do digital watches.” She took off the watchband, opened the back, stared at it dubiously, checked the buttons and lo and behold they’d started working again. She didn’t know why, and this clearly bothered her, but I was happy.

After putting everything back together she handed it to me and ran away to help someone else before technology could vex her any more. I started fastening my watch back on my wrist, turned, and, well, the band fell off, while the tiny metal pin that's supposed to hold it in place tried to roll across the tile floor. So I had to wait for her to come back and fix that, but everything works just fine now.

And to be honest, if I had to be frustrated by anything it was kind of nice to have something other than schoolwork taking up my weekend for a change. Ordinary schoolwork is harder to laugh about.

Knights, pineapples and skate parks?

I recently finished a semester of a beginning drawing class. In short, it was tough. No, it was insane (workload-wise), and it made me seriously consider never taking another art class in college again, but I learned a lot.

I want to emphasize that for a moment because being self-taught for so long made it easy for me to think taking a beginning level class might be redundant, boring and less than useful. That wasn't the case at all for the information presented in class. It was mostly just the nature of the teacher's assignments to be tedious and sometimes redundant within themselves that annoyed me and my own cursed perfectionism that stressed me out. I'm going to give Beginning Painting a try with a different (and hopefully more reasonable) teacher in the spring before I decide if I'll continue working toward an art minor.

I'll start with my midterm assignment since nothing before it was all that interesting in comparison. We had to set up "a complicated still life" in our dorm rooms to draw, 18" x 24", in charcoal. Other requirements included something about repetition of shapes and a line inset drawing that I'm not thrilled about/is not really my style so go ahead and ignore that part.

I don't normally keep a lot of stuff at school that isn't needed, but luckily I had a chance to go home right before the set ups were due and brought a box full of interesting-to-draw-type objects back. The things that made it into the final composition are a wooden box, a couple pewter knights, a pewter cup I bought in Ireland, a chess set, some horse bits and a Hawaiian sarong.

It ended up a lot more detailed than I'd originally intended, so you could say that, for this assignment at least, much of the insanity was self-inflicted.

After that I was burned out for a while and not at all interested in more long, tedious drawing assignments. Especially not another still life. I hate drawing still lifes in general but still lifes of fruit in particular....I think this drawing from early in the semester when I had to draw a bunch of pears expresses my feelings on that subject well enough.

But back to the pineapples. We had until they rotted to finish drawing them using a technical pen. If we stippled the whole thing (dot after dot after dot without ever using a line), we could cut the paper in half. I was all for making it the smallest I could and finishing as quickly as possible after that midterm assignment so that's the option I took. There are two pineapples in it: the leaves belong to a closer one, while the pineapple behind was sitting on a block that raised it higher.

I don't care for it too much personally, partially because my mind wasn't really in it, partly because ink doesn't have the same "life" for me as things that are meant to smear do. But my teacher loved it. She said I could sell it. I asked if she wanted to buy it. That didn't work.

Several assignments later came the final project: a series of two or three drawings (adding up to a certain size) that could be either still life or landscape. I preferred the latter, I just needed to decide what to draw.

I'd also been taking a skateboarding class this semester for a P.E. credit. Through that, the local skate park has become one of my favorite places in the world. I decided it was the most likely place to have interesting shapes to draw for my project.

In typical Pacific Northwest style, it rained all week. Small inconvenience to me when the alternative is a still life. Armed with a camera, an umbrella and a pad of cheap paper, I set about finding three places I wanted to draw from then went to work sketching as much as I could before a sudden downpour forced me to pack up and move under cover.

The whole experience was a very relaxing way to start off my finals week. The park was quiet and for most of the time I was there it only rained lightly off and on. At one point a man came walking down the path in the picture above, talking on a cell phone. It was one of those moments I really wished I could know what he was thinking as he watched me, sitting alone that rainy morning on wet pavement in a skate park, while what I was doing was completely hidden from his view by the umbrella.

Back on campus, I transferred my sketches to good paper and finished one a day in charcoal, referencing photos I'd taken at the park as needed.

This was the first project since the midterm that I was really excited about, and more specifically it was the only assignment I was excited about drawing, since my enthusiasm about the midterm was more about how well it turned out once I'd finally finished it. One downside is that I still can't stop seeing wet pavement everywhere I go.

Summer's end

Well I haven't posted in a while. Too much going on I suppose. I'm currently finishing up the second week of my second year of college classes. My summer was...long and kind of hard to sum up but I'm going to try.

Some highlights: a Christian music festival, two trail rides, three weddings, and a last minute, four-day gold mining trip (which I might write about later).

I also worked on three paintings but so far only finished one of them:

This one was my wedding gift to my sister, who got married in July. I based it off of one of her engagement photos. With it being both the largest painting I've ever done (18x24") and also my first attempt at painting people, it was by far the most ambitious project I've ever taken on and finished. I think more than anything it else it taught me about the importance of taking my time.

I originally tried to finish it in the two days I had before my sister came home from school when I would have to start hiding the fact that I was working on something. Predictably, two (though very long and intense) days was nowhere near enough time. I managed to finish most of the water and the dock in the background.

Next I tried for one week. There was a bridal shower being put on by our aunts in Oregon so there'd be a lot of family there who don't often get to see my artwork. After one week I had everything except the people done. It looked cool, but it wasn't ready to be given away.

So I tried for two weeks. There was a final bridal shower at my church that made a nice deadline. I got very close to finishing it that week, but then I got really sick and wasn't feeling up to doing much of anything for a while. I still had details on the faces and hair to finish up, was getting tired of working on it and probably needed the mental break in order to a good job anyway. Being a perfectionist can get exhausting.

I finally got it all put together and framed three weeks from the day I started. It looks really nice in its frame but unfortunately I haven't gotten a chance to visit their new home and see it up on the wall yet.

Reviewing Bree Tanner

If you haven't already, I encourage you to read part one of this review of The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which tells a bit about where I'm coming from in writing this post.

These are my thoughts on the book:

I. The ending
I didn't understand the ending of this book when I read it. I assume this is because I haven't read the series. For me it's hard to like a book when the ending is so...incomplete on its own. From the title I could only assume that Bree was killed in the end. From just reading this book on its own, it's left a little ambiguous and I didn't know for sure until I looked it up online.

II. The vampires
I hate vampires. Like I said before, this is the first book I've ever read with vampires playing a major role. Reading from one's point of view is disturbing to me, especially all the human hunting. A certain fascination with evil is the only reason I can come up with for people enjoying it. I'm not entirely against dark books--horror, supernatural, dark fantasy--I often like them, but in small doses. So however interesting being inside Bree's head can be, it's not a place I want to dwell for very long and I'm glad this book was short.

III. The romance
The romance wasn't too bad if you ignore the fact that the characters are all bloodthirsty vampires. I don't think this book was meant to be heavily romantic so what's included is fairly light. Like it's only there to satisfy the expectations of Meyer's fan base. What bothers me a bit is that the relationship between Bree and Diego is very quick in developing. Maybe that's the norm for romance fiction, but this book takes it to the extreme. If we're talking about realism though, since when do people fall in love with each other at the exact same time? Right after they meet each other? Not to mention if a guy tried to kiss me the day I first met him I'd probably slap him (at the very least).

What I noticed about Diego is that, unlike some male characters in romantic novels I've read, he's likable. He's willing to think for himself and blood isn't the first thing on his mind. But the more I thought about why he's likable, the more I realized it's because he doesn't have a very distinct personality. He's nice and he has a brain. From Bree's point of view he has no flaws except perhaps his trust of Riley. That could describe any girl's dream guy in the most general terms possible, but if that's all there is to him...how boring for a character. It makes Bree's love for him more unrealistic because it shows that she barely knows him.

IV. The writing
It wasn't as bad as I expected. In this book I didn't notice the kinds of glaring mistakes people have told me exist in Twilight. I assume this means Meyer is improving as she writes more books and this is a good thing.

For the most part the story flows well enough and the pace is good. There were a couple spots where I was a little confused because the narrative seemed to jump just a little or wasn't super clear about what was happening but not too bad. It took me a little while to figure out what a "coven" was, and you'll notice I replaced it with the word "pack" in my synopsis figuring I wouldn't be the only one in the dark about occult terminology like that. And of course there are a few cringe-worthy lines and lots of eye-rolling moments I'm sure you can find by reading the Amazon reviews.

One thing I can compliment Meyer on is her consistency in locking into one point of view for the whole book. (That's one more thing to keep in mind while reading this review: I only have Bree's point of view on the Twilight Saga and Bree doesn't understand much of it either.)

V. Short and simple: did I like it?
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is not brilliant. It's already slipping out of my memory. I think it comes down to the somewhat generic characters. They're good enough to carry a short story line like this, but not unique enough to leave a lasting impression. If the book wasn't about vampires I might have liked it, but the whole thing revolves around a form of unrestrained vampirism that I cannot enjoy. Also, it doesn't stand on its own very well and to fully understand it requires some research into the rest of Meyer's world.

VI. Waste of time or is there something to be learned from it?
First impression: nothing more than an entertaining story. An easy read. Nothing that forces the reader to think very hard. But this book has been on my mind a lot as I write this review and I've realized that it does have a message. And I don't like that message.

What Meyer's done is create a cast of evil vampires and then try to separate them into protagonists and antagonists. I have to commend Meyer for making me sympathize with Bree's situation, despite her being a viscous, bloodthirsty vampire, but I'm not rooting for her as she kills human after human to satisfy her thirst. Conversely, Meyer holds back on making the antagonists distinctly more evil than the protagonists. Instead, every action stems from self-preservation. Thus Bree kills humans, Victoria creates vampires, Riley lies, the Cullens kill Bree. And that's the message this book sends: all these things are perfectly okay as long as they keep me alive. If every character lives by the same rule, whose side am I supposed to be on?

People say the Cullens are "good" vampires but I think the ending of this book kills that argument. Bree kills humans because it's the only way she knows to stay alive. Upon meeting the Cullens she genuinely tries to restrain herself, if only because the Cullens say they'll kill her if she doesn't. And then the Cullens kill her anyway to save themselves from the Volturi. They effectively squash any possibility of redemption for Bree that the rest of the book might have set up.

I think the lack of contrast between Meyer's relatively "good" characters and relatively "evil" characters weakens the story. As a reader, I want to invest sympathy in one side. I want a reason to care about what happens to the protagonist. Instead what emerges from it all is an egocentric, self-serving worldview I strongly disagree with.

The unexpected review

I have a confession to make. I did something last night I never thought I would.

I read a Stephenie Meyer book. 

Only the novella, The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, because I could never make it through a whole novel. Especially since I would have to start with Twilight, her first book, which I hear has terrible writing, and the plot....I can't read that. No way. It would be torture. And then I'd probably feel obligated to read the rest of the series. More torture. I have better uses for my time.


I. So why did I read the Bree Tanner book?
1. It was offered for a limited time as free to read online.
Since it's on my list of books I will not buy or be seen carrying out of a library it was now or never if I was going to read it.

2. Curiosity killed the cat, but I must not be on my last life yet.
I suppose I wanted to know what people saw in her writing to make her a bestseller. Going into this I had heard from different people: that her writing craft in Twilight was terrible, that her writing sucks you in.

3. It's a lot shorter than her novels.
I went into this fully expecting to not like much of the experience. Here was a way to get a feel for her writing without wanting to kill myself before the end. 178 pages sounded much more palatable than 544+.

4. I can finally claim to have my own opinion of Stephenie Meyer.

II. Disclaimer
I think it's important to emphasize that this book is a side story to the events in Eclipse. I have not read Eclipse. I therefore do not understand the context of Bree Tanner's life. That also means that I fall outside of this book's target audience, because it assumes that the reader is familiar with Meyer's vampire novels. Furthermore, this is the first book I've ever read about vampires. I have also not read very widely in the genre of romance books.

In other words, I don't know what I'm talking about. This book is so far outside of everything I like to read I don't have much to compare it to. I guess you should know that everything I'm going to say is largely uninformed and extremely biased. Uniformed because of my decision to read a book meant for an audience familiar with its context in relation to the other Twilight books, biased because I have absolutely no intention of reading those other books for a lot of biased reasons.

All that to say: don't take me too seriously.

III. A brief synopsis with spoilers:
Bree Tanner is a "newborn" vampire (she's only been a vampire for 3 months). She's struggling to survive in a pack of vampires who like to rip each other apart and set each other on fire. While on a hunt she meets Diego, who is not like the other vampires. He's nice to her and actually has a brain. Romantic blah blah blah. Together they discover that their leader Riley has been lying to them about a lot of things (like not being able to go out in the sunlight) and that there are other vampires in the world who want to kill their pack. Riley sends his army of vampires out to kill the smaller, older group of vampires and their pet human (Bella). Really he's just sending them to their deaths because they cannot possibly win against the more experienced vampires, who also apparently have brains. Meanwhile, Bree and Diego are separated and Riley tells her Diego has already gone ahead to the fight. This is another lie and when Bree cannot find Diego she jumps to the conclusion that Riley killed him. Not wanting to fight she surrenders to the older vampires while the rest of the pack is slaughtered. They try to get her to control her thirst for Bella's blood. Then some sort of vampire police come because the creation of newborn vampires is forbidden and they want Bree to be killed.

Since I can already tell this review is going to be long I'm breaking it up into parts. Stay tuned for what I thought of the book.

Random pictures to get out of a non-writing rut

This is my horse and one of the trails winding around the stable he's boarded at. Not me riding him, though. I don't own a fancy camera phone.  My phone is currently invisible and inoperable. Except when it calls aliens if I don't watch it closely. The aliens make my horse glow. Cool, huh?

This is my Thesaurus. His name is Roger. Alas, he died a long time ago. Luckily I still have this book to remember him by, even if the publisher spelled his name wrong.

This is my invisible roommate. Her name is Lluvia and she is trilingual. She speaks English, Russian and Spanish in honor of the three people who might have been my roommates next fall if the best plans never failed.

These are pictures from the animated film The Secret of Kells, which I saw last weekend. I thought it was interesting and very pretty. Definitely different from the other movies I've seen recently. It also made me really want to go back to Ireland. Climbing pretty spiraling trees is always an adventure.

And this is a sketch I drew while I was depressed and not writing blog posts for a month....

Life is getting interesting again. It just takes a little imagination.

Red and green and nothing to do with Christmas

The bridesmaid dresses for my sister’s wedding arrived today.

Long ago when my sister first asked if I would be her maid of honor I told her, “Yes, but please, please, please don’t put me in a red dress.”

I thought it was a simple request. I even repeated it several times over the years to make sure she couldn’t forget. I would wear any color except red. Considering my sister’s favorite color is blue, I can’t even remember why I was worried.

When she started planning her wedding this year she chose burgundy and gold for her colors. In my mind, the burgundy she was thinking about was close enough to red that it would still clash with my red hair. But she kept assuring me that it’s not red, wouldn’t be very close to red, would be closer to purple, etc.

The dresses that came today are red. Fairly close at least. The picture shows me holding a red ribbon and a burgundy cord to compare the dress to so it’s somewhere in between those colors. Everything else about the dress seems nice. But it’s red. Of all the colors in the world why do I have to wear the one that doesn’t look good on me?

 

Yet it’s not the color red that proves that my family members are all going insane because of this wedding. It’s the green.

Last weekend my mom called me and mentioned that my dad was outside building a greenhouse.

This was odd. We used to have a greenhouse for growing strawberries though, so I wondered if he was intending to plant those again. Never mind the fact that the strawberries had never grown very well and the rest of our vegetable garden had long since been converted into part of the archery range.

“No,” my mom said, “It’s for the palm trees. Right now they’re sitting in the living room but there are bugs crawling out of them.”

Palm trees?! I live in Washington. There shouldn’t be any palm trees in my living room. Yet my mom said this as if it was totally normal. Evidently the wedding decorator has gotten a little carried away, because sure enough, when I came home I found the palm trees still taking over the living room and some other plants turning the guest bedroom and the music room into mini forests as well.

 

Presently, a lovely wind storm has knocked out the electricity and I don’t know when I’ll be able to post this. In the meantime I have to go practice walking around in heels again…and that has plenty of potential to quite easily drive me insane. Maybe by the time the lights come back on the palm trees will seem normal to me too.

Gouache painting

For the last few weeks my art class has been working with gouache paint (rhymes with squash), which is an opaque watercolor. I've never really enjoyed using watercolors. I think it's the whole light-to-dark, saving the white space thing that's beyond me. Gouache is a little more manageable though, even if it's not my favorite painting medium. It's pretty easy to fix any mistakes by just painting another layer over them.

The first painting I had to do was a still life that was broken into sections for four different color schemes revolving around one color (I used blue-violet).

Then for my final project I was supposed to do a painting focused on texture. This is what I started with...

...but it just wasn't working for me. Plus my teacher didn't like it. That didn't provide any encouragement to keep struggling with it so....

Last night I decided I would start over with a completely different subject. I was getting really frustrated and a little worried about time. I told myself to relax and let God take care of it in the morning.

Today everything went so much more smoothly. It turned into the kind of piece I can look at for hours afterward and still keep asking, How did that happen? because I certainly didn't know what I was doing at the time. I finished it four hours after starting it, during which time I also walked to the store and back to buy food, ate food, talked to friends and read blogs. So it probably only took somewhere around two hours. Compare that to the ~4.5 hours I spent on that ugly, unfinished donkey. I was expecting to be working on this all the way up to its Thursday deadline!

Conclusion: God is awesome, working with Him is so much easier than working on my own, and I don't know what to do with myself now that I have no more homework.

All of these gouache paintings are done on 14x17" Bristol paper.

Moving onward

First, here is the finished drawing:

In other news, this is my last week of classes and the pressure is on to finish all my final projects and start thinking about packing up my life again to go back home.

Centaur drawing progress

I'm still working on the centaur drawing and hope to be finished by Monday.

I'm not very experienced in working with color so most of this process is rather experimental. As such, I decided to record each step so I can look back at how my experiments worked out. Click on any of the following images to view them larger.

1. Transfer line art to a second piece of paper, using colored pencil. Color highlights yellow.

2. Color mid-tones red.

3. Add blue to shadows.

4. Add brown.

5. Touch-ups and burnishing (blends the colors together and makes them brighter).

Now I just need to come up with a background.

Notes:

• I'm using Prismacolor pencils (Spanish Orange, Poppy Red, Indigo Blue and Light Umber) on 9x12", 65lbs sketching paper. I also use Prismacolor's Colorless Blender for burnishing.
• You don't want to know how much time I spent debating which paper to use (Should I try the 65lbs or the 80lbs? Oh, wait, I have some 75lbs paper here too...) Lol.
• I dislike working "backwards" (When I draw in black and white I usually start with mid-tones/shadows and finish with highlights). So with colored pencils it's easy for me to end up going too dark and not be able to lighten it again.
• If you're interested in looking at the kinds of references I use I found this website helpful.

Unreal times

It's been an intense week in this "safe" little college town.

Monday night, after an absolutely beautiful day filled with good news, good worship, good weather and good entertainment, I had a very long and intense conversation/story sharing time with some floor mates. I have to say that I am so blessed to know people I can be open with about the things that come up in my life, especially my past, but this time I got to mostly just listen and reflect.

Then Tuesday was like disaster day or something.

First, we had a 3-hour evacuation while Haz Mat came to clean up some potentially highly explosive acid that had crystallized in the chemistry stock room. That was exciting, what with everyone talking about the school blowing up. Fire trucks, ambulances and police lined the main street beside the school and police tape and cones marked off most of campus. So all my classes were canceled for that day.

Then in the evening someone downstairs in my dorm set off the fire alarm while cooking a steak.

Then sometime that night someone upstairs in my dorm decided to pull a prank that involved putting a shower curtain in the oven.

Then someone accidentally turned on the oven and burned said shower curtain. I'm now wondering what stupid things people on my own floor might be doing soon.

Also on Tuesday night a girl was assaulted in her apartment on campus. That has a lot of people shook up and security has been heightened quite a bit. Personally, I'm not as shocked by the news as most people here are, especially considering the subject of Monday night's chat, but I'm the semi-paranoid girl who's always looking over her shoulder anyway.

And today I heard that some guy downtown was waving a gun around trying to get the police to shoot him.

I'm feeling more at home every day. (Lol. Not really a good thing). And there are only a couple more weeks until I return to that mad place for the summer.

Continuing the string of strange events, today my roommate got mysteriously locked out of our room while I was at work. My initial response: Darn, that means I have to check all my stuff and make sure nothing's been stolen. (Because if neither of us locked the door it's possible that someone else did). Other people's responses: It was probably the wind coming through the windows that shut and locked the door. I'm not sure how that happened (closed, alright, but locked?) but it appears to be the best explanation.

This is a strange world we live in. Yes, this town is relatively safe; it's crime rate is very low. But that doesn't mean we all have to be surprised by the unexpected. And while common sense and vigilance aren't things I normally have trouble keeping with regard to security, I am reminded that there are other important parts of life that they apply to as well.

Now, brothers, about times and dates we do not need to write to you, for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, "Peace and safety," destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-3).

Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him. (Matthew 24:42-44).

At any rate, these kinds of events are good reminders to pray.

This one's galloping to the East Coast

For me, artwork without motivation doesn't get finished. So I'm really excited that I have a new deadline: a close friend's birthday later this month.

I was originally thinking to draw a minotaur for her but realized that with my limited free time it would be better to stick with my strengths as more of an equine artist for now. So I'm drawing a centaur. And I'm having a lot of fun with it because it's offers just enough of a challenge to keep my interest without becoming frustrating (so far).

Today I finished some sketches and the line art for the drawing:

Now I just need to decide how I want to color it. Critique is welcome, especially at this stage when changes can still be made and the person this is going to happens to be my toughest critic.

Riding out the roller coaster

This week of my life has been a bit of a mess. As soon as I convinced myself that this just wasn't my week all sorts of blessings started rolling in. Then once I thought that maybe things weren't quite as bad as they first appeared I was met with more frustrations and worries, with a family emergency thrown in on top of it all.

Next things calmed down a little and some things even started going right again. I figured out a schedule for classes to take next year that not only looks less intense than what I've been trying to do, but also gives me the possibility of graduating early. Then decisions were finally made about where I'll be living next year and who I'll be rooming with. So that was another uncertainty put to rest. If you're not familiar with how awkward the campus housing selection process is, someone described it to me as being kind of like prom in high school: it's on everyone's mind but no one really wants to talk about it. *

And yet that sort of calm hardly endures more than a few hours before the skies begin to darken again and I'm left wondering how much longer this roller coaster ride is going to last.

Our soul waits for the LORD;
   he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
   because we trust in his holy name.

Let your steadfast love, O LORD, be upon us,
   even as we hope in you.

Psalm 33:20-22

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*My own experience with prom was a little different owing to a certain one of my friends who might have had good intentions but ended up causing a hilarious bit of drama leading up to prom by never shutting up about it. I distinctly remember the writing of a list of "couples" on which the name "Melissa" appeared next the name "Satan."
Basically I got fed up with the whole subject of prom and started tuning out the conversation with loud music. This worked great until I started hearing my name among the shouting that broke out between the girl writing the list and another girl who was strongly opposed to this coupling of people. Following this argument, the second girl's name was erased and rewritten as "Satan" next to mine, since the first girl assumed that we two independents were going to stick together anyway (logic?). 
Although "I went to prom with Satan" makes a highly entertaining story I'm glad that housing went a lot more smoothly ;)

My venture into illustration

I've written a couple of posts already on some of my favorite books, but here is a sort of visual introduction to another. The Door Within Trilogy by Wayne Thomas Batson is the story that got me interested in Christian fantasy when I stumbled across it three years ago.





Last spring I had the opportunity--well, requirement--to do an independent study project for my Theory of Knowledge class. I chose to create a collection of illustrations for The Door Within. The following are my favorites from that project:

 

Larger images of all of these can be viewed in my deviantART gallery: http://andluthen.deviantart.com/