Love Robot!

I made a love robot out of paper for my boyfriend. There is a 3 foot long love note that scrolls out of it, and then you can wind it back in with one of its arms.

Painting

I am enrolled in a painting class this fall, so by the end of the week I will be learning to paint. In one of my intro art classes we were told that naive or untrained artists have a freer take on things (or some such) and that trained artists operate within the framework of knowledge of art history, composition, and conventions, even when they reject these things in a piece their work is then being informed by the conventions. So. I am doing a painting as a "before" training exercise, even though I have made a lot of paintings this one is not based on a photo or purely invented, I drew upon images from my sketchbook and made a composite. Sort of. It is unfinished but I hung it up in my dorm already.
My friend Max took this photo, and even though the light is bad and there is clutter I really like it.
Here I have started the gradiated sky.
Oh dear. I thought I had a better picture of it, showing the leaping animals and everything, but it did not make it on to my flashdrive (I am on a library computer because my laptop hasn't internet. Possibly I should have brought it to the library to connect it to this internet but it was lovely to walk to the library unencumbered)

Deliberate Personal Growth

I am trying to get into the habit of being thoughtful and evaluating things and everything. It can be stressful, but I think it is worthwhile. I am seeking out areas where I am unsatisfied with my skills and going to work on them. I am not happy with my level of numeracy. At the same time, the benefits of mathematics courses seem very small compared to the time and energy commitment and the danger to my gpa. So I have compiled a short reading list of books about numeracy and innumeracy. I think that giving them a thorough read will fill in a gap, because I will be able to understand better the math that I am confronted with in newspapers. (Daily tasks math I already have under control, luckily.)

I love to get books used at local shops, but the only thing the 3 bookstores in town I tried (well, mom needed a book as well, or I would have given up sooner) had was "A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age" which is a very interesting book. However, even though I like the book (and am reserving judgement until I finish it) I think it overemphasizes the importance of literacy in the workings of the modern mind/sense of self. I think nonliterate people raised in a literate culture can probably concieve of the self and whatever quite well. Also it uses Kaspar Hauser as an example of nonliterate thinking, and idk, that was a hoax.

Lake Tulloch Studies

We went to the lake! It was hot! Visual art makes me not think of words! I took some pretty photos (lakes are photogenic) and so did mom, and then I worked on these studies. Only the tree one is from life, the rest are composites from photos.


This is my favorite. I made it from a picture of Dad and the tent, a picture of Nick and mom and the tent, and a picture of the tent. It required a thumbnail sketch to work out the positioning.
This is better as a photo (it is on my facebook).
A tree

This will look a bit nicer when the ink dries.
Extreme foreshortening is a challenge for me, I have a pencil sketch of this but do not feel confident to ink it.
finger campfire

The lovely, lovely view from the tent.

Sculpture 1 Final Piece Painted

Nice, right?
The finish is pretty bad, i don't know how I could have done it better though. It actually evened out a lot when I sponged on thinned down black and then wiped it off.
Top view
Crab side
So. I thought of a thing, then I made that thing nearly exactly. It's a very satisfying thing to be able to do, kind of akin to learning your first language really- it lets you show people "no, look, this is *exactly* what I am thinking of." In the case of this sea creature, ah, it was probably 30 hours of work (plus I did not do my own kiln tending, which is more work that someone did) which was possibly not worth it for the end result. But theoretically, the ability to execute and render concepts is quite powerful.

Sculpture 1 Masks

Made some tiny masks for art class, not an assignment but in order to kill time- we had to be there to dip our lost wax pieces but we had finished all our assignments except those still in the kiln, and also there was no guarantee that we would get to use the kiln this term, because the pieces need to be bone dry to go in which takes a few days, and the kiln was to be loaded the next day. So, we made very small pieces. I had nothing kicking around in my brain, no half concept to flesh out into a little creation, so I very boringly made little faces with slight variations that I reasoned I could paint vibrantly when I was feeling more creative. Today was a day for finishing pieces, and I used my little pieces to test how successful different techniques for applying acrylic paint to bisqueware are. It turns out that if you shellac it first with a spray varnish the clay will not absorb water from the paint and make it blotchy. (I thought we were supposed to shellac after painting). So, I made 5 lopsided little faces. 2 were bad enough to toss (I thought a seahorse nose and a single tentacle for hair would look playfully oceanic but it didn't work) and I don't like the orange one very much but I think three of something has a lot less pressure on each component than 2 does. The antlers are made of twigs that I hotglued into holes. The moon is iridescent.

Sculpture 1 lost wax sculpture

Okay. In a six week summer course we have done coil building, slab building, bas relief, plaster molds, 3-d plaster molds (I didn't do one of those), free sculpture, and now lost wax bronze casting. It is so many hours, I barely do other art. The quick pace meant that we had only a morning to do our wax sculptures that we are going to cast. Everyone liked mine. I like mine a lot. I had Carly Simon stuck in my head* the whole time I worked on it.
Hard to tell the scale, isn't it? It's perhaps 7" tall.


I used to make little polymer clay marionettes and sculptures, so this was not the first figure I've sculpted, but in this course I have not done one because I don't know the fundamentals of proportion so I would just disgrace myself in front of the intermediate and advanced students. So, for this, I carefully overemphasized and exaggerated proportions. Then, because wax dips remove material when you leave it in for a while and add it when you dip quickly and let in cool, the original proportions got all changed, and now it looks quite like my proportions if my legs were thinner or farther apart. A classmate asked, "Who is that? Just some random person?" well, yeah, actually. I like my body, I realized today while trying to justify my choice, the way people like their country or their dog. It's nothing special, but it's theirs, so they get attached. Everyone else made very simple sculptures: a star, a mushroom, an acorn, a leaf. And they are kind of nice, but idk, bronze! It is a metal! I felt pressured to come up with something more personally meaningful because metal is so permanent.


This is what it looks like dipped in acid, fine sand, acid, fine sand, acid, and coarse sand.
*Oh dear. I just youtubed this to make sure it was what I was thinking about, and hey, only part of the chorus is about me, the rest is some bs about like clouds.