Observations

Thursday 29th October

Wow! Now that was a trying day. Up until this morning every face i have ever drawn has looked expressionless and dull, now i find myself capable of bringing life to a character, by simply observing my own facial expressions,it’s that simple and why i have never thought of doing it before i dont know. Todays lesson was constructive an overall success. I could have improved and produced more though if i didnt care about others observing mw whilst i observe myself. just a little bit embarrassing and something im just going to have to get over.  And then it comes to drawing the dreaded hands. This didnt go too badly….they look a little disfigured maybe but this is something i will i will improve on over time and practice…..i hope. It would also help to learn the anatomy of the hand and how it functions as it can produce many dynamic poses and is a way to express/gesture something. Would also be very useful in animation which i hope to pursue in the future.

“I am always doing that which i cannot do, in order that i may learn how to do it” – Pablo Picasso

^.^

Tuesday 27th October

“Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore we are saved by love” – Reinhold Niebuhr

I have found that love. <3 1 month. Going strong. X

Flatmate hell

Friday 23rd October

“You must not loose faith in humanity, Humanity is an ocean, if a few drops of the ocean are dirty the ocean does not become dirty” – Mohandas Gandhi

The 3 P’s

Thursday 22nd October

People. Places. Props. There are actually 5 P’s altogether including Poise and Position and these are all semiotics – the language of science. So i went around the Graham Sutherland building and i chose a place to begin with and sketched it out then a prop. I considered how these two things could fit in with each other before deciding on the position of my figure. This seemed easy enough to begin with but then i had to think about camera angles, where as the viewer am i going to be looking at this scene from. I had to consider negative space, do i want this to become a point of focus or not and also the type of lighting. What am i trying to convey and do i want to say something without actually saying it, to imply something by using clever direction.

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work” – Rita Mae Brown

Adobe Illustrator

Monday 19th October

Wasn’t impressed.  Looked through some basic vector techniques and homework was set to vector a photo of myself. As much as i despise doing art on the computer and adobe illustrator itself i ended up getting into it. It took a whole 8 hours not that it looks like it and here it is:

“Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be” – Don Quixote

Expression

Thursday 15th October

Today i learnt expression through figure poses and expression within the eyes using a  line of action and a simple mask technique. I thought i could never achieve this without taking my ideas from someones elses already existing ideas. I proved myself wrong.

“We have a hunger of the mind which asksfor knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire, the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing” – Maria Mitchell

Creative direction

Monday 12th October

A little less confused. In the proverb brief there was a section of team work.  Now for this situation ‘team’ is quite a worrying term, considering there are 30 creatively inspired students in one room, all driven by different things, all with unique ideas and concepts. We were split into 3 groups of 10 and given titles. I happen to be in group 1. Creative Direction so together we have to come up with the overall design which then gets passed onto group 3. Publishing who get their money from group 2. Funding and the one problem is getting all 30 students to agree on one single idea. As expected, it proved difficult. We argued/ debated for quite some time and travelled round in a few circles but eventually came to a decision. Compromisation i can say is something that needs to be improved drastically. I also had my first life-drawing class since being at Uni, apart from seeming very disorganised and being restricted to only drawing in pencil it went rather well. =]

“I am always doing that of which i cannot do, in  order that i may learn how to do it” – Pablo Picasso

A book i would never read

Life lesson-1.

Thursday 8th October

Today we travelled back to the complete beginning with how we hold a pencil to drawing a lot of lines and circles. At the time i thought this was kind of stupid and childish but reflecting on it now it is helping me in my current drawing to get expression across through quick confident lines using the whole of the upper body. Things dont always have to be  perfect first time you learn more from your mistakes and the more mistakes you make the more knowledge and understanding you will gain. I have learnt to not judge change in a changing world, or be left behind in the past where everything has already been done.

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” Charles dubois

Project – Proverbs

Monday 28th September

So this is it. Freshers week is over and now begins the first class of many to come. I strangely didnt find this experience as daunting as it should have been. Looking back at past situations i have come to realise the reason for this unusual rise of confidence. I’m here in a new place and i suppose you could see it as a new life with new friends and new personal goals, no one knows the previous me and therefore i can be whoever i wish to be and so far its going pretty good. So anyway, i arrived to a whole class of strange faces and a deadly silence. We were given quite a vague brief titled ‘Proverbs’ which i think everyone is a little confused by. The proverb that was selected for me was ”There are 40 kinds of lunacy but only one kind of common sense” and im still not sure what to think of it. I was going to ask Ron but he seems just as clueless as me so i didnt bother. I’ve decided that im going to self-help and figure it out on my own, beginning with dictionary/thesaurus definitions of the keywords ‘lunacy’ and ‘common sense’ and brainstorming from other peoples interpretations of these two words in the hope of finding a connection between them that will help me to make sense of the proverb above. The class was only a few hours and i was left feeling overall bewildered and unsure what to think…

“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” – Alan Cohen