Watercolors

6"x 4.5"

6"x 4.5"

6"x 4.5"

After working in my sketchbook all afternoon, three watercolors have sprung into existence. There have been numerous watercolor drawings on Etsy recently, and I've stumbled upon Sara Frankel's artwork. Sara taught a landscape drawing class I attended over the summer. Her watercolors are fantastic, and huge. I now understand her trying to get the class to attack water as a subject in our drawings.

And to remind myself and everyone else exactly how far I've come, I've started a Flicker page under mkkoala. I haven't uploaded everything just yet. So far I have work spanning from high school to my sophomore year. I'll upload more as I have the time to keep an eye out.

Tablet

More learning of Photoshop with my tablet.

Sketchbook

So I'm taking a class called Arts and Images in Contemporary Art, a lecture and film based class where we discuss contemporary, modern, and avant garde art. The only grade for this class is a sketchbook to be turned in at the end of the semester. I've spent more than half the semester thinking up and creating this sketchbook. I've knitted and felted the cover, a process that took at least three different tries. The pages are hand torn 140 test weight, cold pressed watercolor paper.

Fifth and Final Week of the Figure

After 5 weeks of working, that's 5 classes at 3 hr and 45 min totaling 17hrs and 15min, I have completed my figure. I was one of probably 4 students in the class who spent the entire time on one painting. I am very pleased with the outcome and received many compliments from my professor.

Figure: Week Four

Week four of figure, one more to go. It came a long ways this week, I think, and has lost some of its awkwardness. I now love that protruding knee. It's so 3 dimensional. In need to work the rest with such palpable roundness.

Landscapes

I really like these landscapes I've been doing. Oil on wood panel 14" x 16".

Yay Tablet!

I've been continuing to play with my new drawing tablet and re-learning the intricacies of photoshop. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Progress

Here are pictures of my in-class figure painting, in chronological order. So, you can see the development. Still two more weeks on this one.

Toy

New pen and ink drawing or did I just get an early Christmas drawing tablet?

And Through Struggle Come Small Pieces of Honesty

oil on wood
10" x 14"

oil on canvas scrap
5" x 7"- ish

oil on canvas scrap
4" x 7"-ish

After struggling with my self portrait for a few hours, I spit out another series of small landscapes. Having worked on such a large scale, there is something cathartic about scaling down and simplifying. These works again have a much more developed color palette than the self portrait.

Self Portrait in Progress

Each painting class I've taken has required a self portrait. I both love and hate them. I find them one of the most challenging because we are most critical of ourselves. So the portraits serve mangled, conflicting purposes; capturing the most idealized perception of myself, glaring self criticism, and reality.

Okay, Maybe Food Too

On Sunday I made Great Grandma Freda's rye bread and lentil soup. Both were fabulous.

For the soup I roasted a head of garlic in the oven, while starting my soup. When the garlic was done, I mashed up the cloves into a paste and dissolved them into the soup for roasted garlic-y goodness.

Figure

We've started a 5-6 week long figure painting. My teacher had us layout the scene as we liked. He gave us complete control, and of course, we didn't know what the hell to do with it. It took us the better part of 45 min. to set it up, until, finally our teacher came back and got us heading in the right direction. So, yes that is a skull in the lower right hand corner of the painting, that the figure is somewhat glancing down to.

This was taken after the first three and a half our session. I've scaled up the drawing and laid down some initial colors. I worked on it last week, though forgot to take a picture, so of course it no longer looks anything like this, as the figure changes slightly form week to week. On Wednesday I should have two pictures, and you'll be completely up to date on the piece.