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.