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Archive for the 'school' Category

Mar

Scholarship

By rei 0 Comments

Categories: art and school

Today I received official notification that I am the recipient of the John A. Johns memorial scholarship. Of the four that I applied for, this was the one I most hoped to receive – the scholarship I had to submit my own illustrations for — so I am very excited.

I am also a tad overwhelmed. There is an awards ceremony next Tuesday, and I am expected to be there, with a short speech if possible. I am to write letters of thanks to the family of John A. Johns, and also have a discussion with…honestly, I’m not sure who she is…someone from the school…about who John A. Johns was and what he meant to the art community and the Art Institute and the faculty thereof (he used to be the school president). So I have a lot of responsibilities that come with the scholarship.

But mostly, I am excited, and honored. YAY!

Mar

Entirely too much homework

By rei 2 Comments

Categories: art, rants and school

Here I sit, warm cat on my lap, more caffeinated than is entirely necessary, fingers on my keyboard with my fishtank gurgling contemplatively nearby.

I should be content, nay, happy.

But what this gentle and happy scene fails to take note of is the pile of homework, just out of frame.

The quarter approaches it’s end and project due-dates grow closer. Honestly, I’m not in THAT bad of a place. I will probably be spending a few weekends in, and may, possibly, miss a night of sleep somewhere along the way…but I’m not horribly behind. I’m pretty current. I just need to stay the course, or keep my nose to the grindstone or some similar cliche.

I want to chuck the lot out in the snow. (The homework, that is. I still have occasional use for a good cliche.)

Every time I nod contentedly to myself and approve of the fact that I am, indeed, making some sort of progress in my personal work and my overall level of skill, I stumble upon something awesome that makes me long to ignore all my responsibilities and just work on getting better at plain simple art. Screw art-related homework. I wanna draw. I wanna develop original characters and do fan art and experiment with composition and style, and improve my skill with the human figure and with faces and with expressions and with poses and forshortening and perspective and oh yeah, backgrounds too, and having a foreground and a middle ground and setting scenes and use of color and use of no color….

I have been participating in a bi-monthly art challenge…super low pressure, not full of people so intimidatingly good that I’m terrified to submit art…just something that keeps my art muscles in use and makes me think about concept and presentation…just a small thing I can do in my spare time. Unfortunately, about now I don’t really have that, so my participation is on hiatus, which is frustrating me.

Honestly, the situation isn’t all that bad…I my partner on the photo book loves where I’m going with the design. I’m making more work for myself than I need to for my packaging graphics class, because that is who I am — AND the work I’m doing for the project is illustrative. If I want to or need to, I can always simply do the research paper for my art history class, rather than the giant, time-consuming project. And my lit class is going fine and has pretty minimal homework. I’m just feeling resentful of time I don’t have to work on my own projects, and frustrated that I’m not perfect. Yeah, hard life, right?

Hey, at least I’m posting. You should be more grateful.

Feb

Packaging Graphics

By rei 0 Comments

Categories: art and school

For my packaging graphics class — redesign of a children’s product (toy, candy, food, etc.)

Because I had some laying around the house, I went with Sweethearts conversation hearts.

<–frankly, I’m not fond of this design. Their old one was better. …though I suppose, at least they don’t sparkle.

The first redesign turned out great.

The second…not so much. Oh well. The part that is most frustrating about it is that I fought with the darn thing ALL day. But the position is off, there isn’t enough contrast, and seriously in comparison to the other one, the design is pretty darn static, anyway. *sigh*

Stupid design.

Edit — So, everyone really seemed to LIKE the second one…even though I was less than thrilled with it. SOOOO, I suppose that means I’ll have to find an actual reference photo and do it right….*sigh*

ALSO, more than one person felt that the first design was ‘too pink’…I personally feel, Valentine’s Day –> pink, and the original packaging is pretty pink…and that the image didn’t have enough differentiation from the background and tended to blend in — a problem on something with small packaging. So, I tried some variations in color and value (I think I rather like the gold):

<– click to enlarge

Next — more work on version two…like actually using reference photos!

*update* Sketch for the new drawing. Hoping it comes out better…used a photo reference and everything…unfortunately, my model couldn’t quite grasp the ‘imagine you are reaching up for something’ idea and I had to improvise a bit. We’ll see how the finished product comes out:

I think, far superior to the original:

Feb

Time marches on in February

By rei 1 Comment

Categories: my cats, school and weather

The blizzardy winter weather has finally broken, and temperatures have been hovering at least a little above freezing during the daylight hours, leaving squelchy mud in the place of slippery packed ice, only to crust and harden once the sun drops below the tree line. The piles of winter snow have diminished to a few inches — our driveway remains impassable, but only just.

By the time we arrived home last night, a day of rain and melting had resulted in a soft, dense fog. While ascending the still necessary trail to our front door, I had reason to pause in amazement at the gentle luminescent glow that captured every spare bit of light in the area and reflected and refracted the illumination thousands of times over through the air and across our snowy yard. The ethereal blue-white radiance contrasted starkly against the unbroken black of the marshy path, and behind our house, winter bare trees reached spectrally through the incandescence…a fantastic sight, in the purest sense of the word.

In this enduringly grey and sodden month, life remains much unchanged. School carries on at a pace at once alarmingly quick and frustratingly ponderous, classes seeming merely dull placeholders at one time and desperately vital at another.

Robin, at long last, had his most important operation–a fact that seems to have effected his spirits and exuberance not in the least, much to our bemusement. (We have determined that the fault is likely mine, for naming him as I did.) This past night, he was found perched precariously atop our bedroom door, seemingly perplexed as to how he had arrived in such a place and, finding himself in the situation, just what to do about it. The only change seems to be in Mercury’s attitude, as she has become less tolerant of his presence than she had been prior to his brief time away.

Not much else of interest has come to pass — certainly nothing approaching the magnitude of our deeply exciting and incapacitating snow storm. The days become longer, the world turns towards spring, and the days of each of us, in turn, become ever so slightly shorter.