Holiday Break

Here it is, New Year's Eve, and my Holiday Break is almost over. Soon I'll be back in Providence and taking my Wintersession courses: Graphic Novel (aka Comics) and Intro to Computer Animation. Hopefully I will have more time to climb and possibly even set at the RI Rock Gym.

Anyway, here are some videos of my favorite blind dog playing with his new toy :)





Enjoy!

Drawing Final!

About an hour or so ago I called it quits on my drawing final. The assignment was fairly open but required that we include ourselves in a large drawing that communicates space. My drawing is approximately 40"x55" and I would guess that at least twenty hours were spent working on it (not including planning, sketches, etc). It is 100% charcoal with about 500 layers of fixative on top...



I decided to depict my floor in Homer Hall to tell a sort of narrative about my first semester at RISD. In the far back, the silhouette is standing next to the door of my room. I have a packing box in place of my head, representing my arrival. The next three figures are stand-ins for my three studio classes: 3D, 2D, and Drawing (in order from farthest to nearest). The lightbulb exploding is due to the large amount of theory and concept we covered in our drawing class. The front figure is me, holding an egg...which could mean a variety of things but I decided to leave it ambiguous.

The whole drawing is meant to communicate a sort of disjointed weirdness -- like how my time at RISD so far has been a somewhat unreal experience so far removed (figuratively and literally) from my years at high school in the PacNW. This is why all of the figures have something amiss with them. The alterations to the back ones are fairly obvious, but even if it's not readily apparent, the front figure is larger than would make sense considering the perspective and placement.

While I'm not completely happy with this piece, I am fairly pleased with the way it came out and the concept behind it. Now all I have left to do at RISD this semester is finish my English essay...and I'll be free!

2D and 3D Final Projects!

After many hours of toil and frustration I have finished two of my final projects. I am always curious to see how many hours go into the pieces I make at RISD but honestly I have no idea. It should be enough to say that in the past week my average bedtime has been 5am. But really the fatigue doesn't matter when you're doing something that truly fascinates you.

In any case, for my 3D project I made a sort of soap box car, loosely based off of a prototype I made earlier in the year. Working on it was a series of failures, redesigns, and reconstructions. I never learned how to use power tools with any semblance of skill, so I used this project as my own personal woodshop class. While the car (working title: rocketcar) didn't turn out like the idealized image I had first envisioned, I am happy with the amount of learning that took place while working on the assignment. I would love to make another soap-box style car again in the summer if I have the time and money.

The rocketcar does not have true axles. In each "axle" there is a five inch lag bolt in the 2x4 where the wheel (plywood) connects. Each wheel therefore rotates independently. The car has steering by means of pushing the front axle with your feet. I unfortunately did not put in any brakes yet, so I won't be flying down College Hill anytime soon -- But the car is functional and I would estimate holds up to 180lb.


I test out the car during crit


Comparison to my early prototype (illustration board)

My 2D project, entitled "Furs," is a short animation based on the concept of climate change. It is comprised of approximately 250 hand drawn and scanned frames on tracing paper. I unfortunately had to put the thing together in iMovie, which probably added at least three hours to the editing time. I started with the idea of animals removing their fur as one would take off articles of clothing. It turned out a lot darker than originally intended, but I suppose that's all you can expect from such a creepy idea.



Still to be completed is my drawing project, art history final, and a research paper for English...But with these two projects out of the way my workload is essentially halved. Maybe I'll get some sleep this week? One can only hope.

Dulles - An Intermission

So here I am waiting at Dulles Airport waiting for my flight and thinking I should really update my blog. The week before Thanksgiving break was unusually relaxed for me. This was a very strange feeling as I am becoming used to constantly doing work and having about an hour or two of spare time a day, max. It allowed some fun activities such as watching the supposed meteor shower wearing our tin foil hats (don't want to get abducted, do you?!)... Even though we only saw one meteor flash.


Pick me!


Robbie is a sprout!


A shaky photo of Providence at night

Another distraction from work was the slackline(s) Jay and I set up between some trees on the Brown campus. Unfortunately it was quite chilly so we headed over to Nice Slice after an hour of glorious slacking.


We set up next to the clocktower


Jay tries (and fails) the mantle-start

Here it is after a wonderful Thanksgiving and I'm looking forward to three weeks of neverending work. It's almost terrifying to think now of how much I have to do. In any case, I'll be glad when my final projects are over and I can return home yet again.

The Approach of Thanksgiving

I'm writing this post from my art history lecture. Don't worry, parents, it hasn't started yet and I'm not missing anything. Anyway, the past few weeks have been just as crazy busy as usual and I don't really have time to make a quality post. Just logging in to say that I've added a few images to my Picasa and that it's crazy to think I'll be going home in a week. You just get caught up in the rhythm of RISD life and having several days without studio will be very strange.

Hopefully while I'm home I'll have some time to catch up on what I've done the past few weeks, as I'm sure some of the images in my picasa are confusing without explanation.

Quick Update!

I've been ridiculously busy and haven't had time to put up a real blog post. This one is just to say that you can find all of my photos on my Picasa account, right here.

Enjoy!

Cape Cod Trip

Monday was our trip to Cape Cod! My 3D teacher, the awesome Eddie Oates, took us to his house -- which is also a museum of his own work over the last thirty or so years. It was inspiring to see the variety and originality in his pieces. Also interesting was a series of around one hundred sketchbooks containing self portraits. Eddie has drawn a self portrait once a day for thirty years.


Jay grabs a nap on the hour-long ride


Eddie Shows us around the place


Interesting piece from a larger series


My favorite piece from Eddie's museum

Anyway, once our tour of his museum was over we rode over to the beach. It was very cold and windy, but the wave action was fantastic and more than made up for any discomfort.





Intense waves...


It was so cold!


An adorable and friendly dog came to say hi!


But soon ran back to her owner :(


Section eleven and Eddie!

I finally took some pictures from my work in 2D class. So far it's mostly just exercises in tone and colour. Here is a series of 8x8 gouache paintings for this purpose:


Some of my black and white compositions


Recent colour compositions (second is a study for the third)

Time for a nap after all this blogging...RISD rocks.

First Polyhedra Drawing

My Saturday...so many words to describe it. But I think it is best represented by the word "toil." I worked from 2pm to 9:30pm (with an hour break) in the studio on a drawing of seven or so of the polyhedra made for Drawing class. Craving excitement, I went to Thayer with some friends to grab a bite at an awesome place called Nice Slice. Perhaps the best pizza place ever. Imagine a flavor of pizza, and they will have it out for you. Every time I visit I get a different type. I'm really reppin' this place because it is fantastic.


Some delicious Reed's Spiced Apple Ginger Beer.
This stuff is fantastic!


Robbie enjoys a slice...


Ceiling art

After that brief break I returned to the workroom and drew for three more hours. After another hour of work in the morning what resulted was this charcoal drawing on illustration board. It's pretty large - 30"x40" and a pain to lug around. I really wish I'd rendered the guy better, but after 10+ hours I didn't really care to make it exact.

The boy (Jay) is actually a bit larger but I made him smaller to make it more of a dramatic contrast between organic and artificial shapes.

Today we wanted to go to a hockey game, but it was unfortunately canceled. I wish we'd known that before we walked all the way there in the 35 degree rainy weather. On the bright side, on our way back we stopped at this awesome Indian store and I got a fuzzy warm hat and a free peacock feather!


Finally I'm not freezing!

Tomorrow I'm visiting Cape Cod during my 3D class, more on that later!

Mad Busy Week

So much to do! The past week (or two? lost track) have been comprised of late nights and cups of coffee. Despite all the work I've been doing, it doesn't seem like I have that many pieces to show for it. I'm probably just being impatient, but it's hard to shake the feeling. Anyway, we made our last two furniture drawings for class! We were all glad to be done with the project after three weeks of the same homework. I wasn't too happy with my pieces this time, probably because they were quite rushed; I had a lot of other work to do.
Here are the most recent:






I also finished a different assignment for drawing, this one was to make a polyhedron (many-sided solid). Mine is the eighth stellation of the icosahedron. A stellation occurs when you extend all the planes on the object in every direction in order to make a new shape where the planes intersect. So the icosahedron has twenty sides, each of which are equilateral triangles. Stellate eight times, and you'll get the shape I created. It is cut from six pieces of illustration board and stuck together with hot glue. Building it was very much like solving a puzzle -- until I understood the 3D pattern each piece adhered to, I couldn't fit together the pieces. Because of this, I probably wasted 3-5 hours putting it together the wrong way. Fortunately, I fiddled with it long enough to have a breakthrough, and the rest came easily.




Here is the finished product, hanging in my room to dry after painting.



Another view!


On a side note, Providence has beautiful sunsets! The end of my hall faces west, so we get a great view.




I'll try to get some pictures up from something BESIDES drawing class soon!

Week Deux, etc.

This isn't exactly chronological, but here's some stuff that happened recently.

I've done four of the furniture drawings so far, and I have two more to go. I kind of wish we could draw something besides tables and chairs for once...



First Drawing



Second Drawing

We had a shaving cream fight on Saturday. If you've never participated in such an event, it's exactly what it sounds like. Pics taken from Mary's facebook.



Preparation


Post-Fight


!


I tried my hand at making a violin from one piece of cardboard for 3D class. It takes about 6 hours to draw out the plan, cut it out, then fold up the violin.


Tape is just temporary

I'm trying to do a series of self portraits, because my 3D teacher said that he's done a self-portrait every day for 30 years. Better start now...


9/27


9/29


10/1 (today!)

Maybe sometime I'll get the other pictures of the drawing assignments

First Week

I'm posting this a week late :X

First week went pretty well, even though I got a lot of homework. Somehow it was still all manageable. By the way, my classes are 2D, 3D (aka spatial dynamics), Drawing, English, and Art History. They all have fancy long names to go on the transcript, but no one uses these official titles. My drawing homework was kind of ridiculous. Two drawings of six hours each. Not so bad, except that the drawings are of a 10 ft tall pile of random furniture and at first you only draw the vertical lines, extending them to the ends of the page (and then the horizontals, etc). Very tedious.



Ridiculous pile of furniture


For 2D I made a gouache grayscale and ended up cutting out about 30 or 40 strips.




Strips all lined up.
On Saturday, we went to the RISD "farm," which is really not a farm at all but a beautiful beach! :)


Great view!

Awesome bottle I found on the beach. I put it back to save the sea-creatures on it...

One night we painted our doorframes! Mine is a sort of orange monster.


Remind you of the Kraft mac-n-cheese dino at all?

More on the next week when I can charge up my camera!

Arrival

Someday, I learn draw good. This blog is about my time at RISD -- sharing photos and anecdotes for my friends and family back home.

I arrived on the RISD campus late Saturday morning and moved my things in. I was lucky enough to get a single...It's a much better room than expected. Pretty spacious and all.




Colbert guards my bed (FOTC on wall not shown)
















My lovely desk. I've already spent a lot of time working here.
















There are actually only two of these shelves on my floor.

















My walls are concrete, so I had some issues hanging my bulletin board. Luckily, I had some climbing gear and foam shelf liner available to jury-rig a hanging apparatus.
















All in all, my experience at RISD so far has been overwhelmingly positive (despite the copious amounts of homework in the first few days).