Back to School Update: One Month Under My Belt!

Well, it has been exactly one month since first day of class - what a fabulous experience it has been. Everyone has been very welcoming and great to work with - definitely caused me to meet and get to know different folks than would normally cross my path, which has been very good. I forget the generation gap most of the time although not sure how easy it is for everyone else. One day, while working with nib pen drawings, the instructor commented that I must have had some experience with them. I went on to tell her that when I was a child, we had to use nib fountain pens until grade 5 to make sure we developed good penmanship. As I watched her and another student's response, I recognized the same look on my face when my father-in-law told me that he took a horse and buggy to school - started to feel pretty old, but only lasted for a moment.

I've been working on lots of stuff since my last post. In ceramics we experimented with different ways to build cups and then had to design a set of cups based on a theme. Here is my version of cups as Mountain landscape. They are not fired yet - hopefully the colours will change and they will stay in one piece during that process. Will post the final product.

In fibre class, we finished off our cardboard furniture piece - here he is - just over 6 ft tall. My instructor suggested that I build some cardboard figures to illustrate the purpose of the piece (she wouldn't go for using the felt creatures that it is intended for) so I ended up making cardboard gnomes too.

Drawing class was a very interesting challenge in working with grey-scale. This self portrait is 40X55 inches made up of 94 squares of different marks to achieve the tone needed. It is based on a bottom lit black and white picture (scary - have not done the bottom lit thing since telling ghost stories under a blanket as a kid). To top it off, it had to be drawn upside down. I can tell you that multi-focals and old joints are a whole different challenge when working on a piece this tall.

Painting was another interesting challenge - doing a still life to work on colour theory and blending of paints. We were limited to one warm and cool hue in each of red, green, and blue and had to block in colours - no glazing which is my natural tendency. I have never experimented so much with colour mixing and learned huge amounts although still feel shaky. I managed to make a perfect black - something I have never achieved before and may never again.

Our painting home work this week was to make an abstract about a cultural or personal interest and choose a title and sound bite to accompany it. I came up with "See Sea" which will be accompanied by Whale song. I was so excited about the colour blending thing that I wanted to experiment with mixing blues and greens as well as testing out the impact of complementary colours.

Next week promises to be even more fun!