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!