18 posts tagged “college”
HOLY SHIT
Koshalek's contract is NOT being renewed! I can't believe it! I can't believe they actually listened to us. Dude I was so fully expecting nothing to happen. I don't even know what to say. I hope we did a good thing here.
Today was the day of the follow-up meeting to the huge and emotionally-charged Art Center Student Government / student meeting from a couple of weeks ago (which was actually recorded and put up on youtube here), and this time Richard Koshalek (the president of the school) and the board of trustees were up there, front and center, to answer questions and basically be grilled by the few hundred students and alumni in attendance for two and a half hours.
A reporter from the LA Times was there, and his article is already up on the lat website, here: click it. It's a pretty impartial report and does a decent job of explaining the situation at Art Center right now. I could elaborate on some things, but it's all really complicated and I don't have the energy to go into it here. If anyone is interested in reading a blog ranting (intelligently) about the current problems at Art Center, you can go read the blog post that started it all: designercowboy.blogspot.com, and skim though the [at the moment, exactly] 800 comments left by students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
I thought today's meeting was pretty successful. I am thankful that it happened. There was a dialog between students and Koshalek/the board, and that was something that needed to happen. We are making the severity of our concern with the school known and we are (at least on some level) being heard and acknowledged. Some people who are in the position to know have informed us (the students/alum) that some of the answers we were given today were not entirely truthful--that there was a lot of spin going on--but it was still something, we did get somewhere, we were not ignored. Hopefully this whole thing has made an impression. Enough of an impression to make a difference.
There is a board of trustees meeting on the 19th (the time and location is being kept secret from us) that will decide on the renewal of Koashalek's contract. We're trying to figure out what more we can do before then.
I said I'd post a picture of the as-big-as-me drawing once I took one, so here it is:
What happened: I got to class about an hour early just to give me some time to erase stray pencil lines, re-ink some spots, and generally clean it up before critique. I worked on it a little bit and everything went fine. But then 5 minutes before class was to start, I was putting my supplies away and cleaning up my area when I grabbed my nearly-full bottle of blue ink by the not-actually-screwed-on cap and spilled the whole thing onto the table, the floor, and the right edge of the drawing. Disaster! My frantic 2-second solution was to cut the figure free from the now-stained surrounding paper and add some more color splotches to make it look intentional. I think that cutting it out was a positive change.
As far as the drawing goes... it is about things like the beauty of the human body, starvation, protest, veganism, efficiency, body temperature, thermography, maps, and size.
I wish I had a place to put it.
I just got around to taking pictures of more school things...
The pink and blue one was done in one class session. I kind of like how the mailbox sorta looks like a second dog.
This is a combination of Mexican folk art designs and amanitas muscaria mushrooms. I was running on 0 hours of sleep when I drew it.
This was for drawing concepts. We had to paint a portrait of someone we had never seen, based only on the information given in his/her obituary. This is Kate Webb, an Australian woman who was a foreign correspondent news reporter in Cambodia during the Vietnam war. She was captured by Vietnamese troops and mistakenly reported as dead. After being held captive for three weeks, she was released for no apparent reason.
detail:
and how I imagined her feet might've felt...
I'm not sure how to begin to explain this one, but it means a lot to me and I am very happy about it.
This hairy sucker sort of relates to Stuffed-animal Face up there. These are also from drawing concepts.
That's all for now. I still need to take a presentable picture of the big drawing. I'll do it later.
PS: I just set up a flickr account where I'll keep all of my art junk organized! --->LINK
FIRST: IF ANYONE HAS AN EXTRA ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR CODE ON THEIR HANDS AND WOULD LIKE TO HELP ME OUT IN AN ENORMOUS WAY, SEND ME A MESSAGE!
Here is what I've been doing in comp and painting, in chronological order, the one in color being the most recent. Oil paint. Most of them aren't finished because 5 hours isn't really long enough for a painting class. The ones that ARE finished are things I did at home. Most are 16"x20". (The spacing of these thumbnails is all retarded because vox is dumb).
The rest of these are from drawing concepts...
These two are from the Ugliest Person I've Ever Seen assignment. The one on the left is my interpretation of someone else's ugliest person, and the one on the right is my ugliest person. These were fun to do. I shouldn't even be posting these pictures though, as the terrible photos have killed most of the detail, which is sort of the most important thing about them. These are pretty big; 18"x24"
Um, if you'd like an explanation of this one, I will give you one.
This is most recent. We went on a field trip to downtown LA to draw the people and scenery around us, and our homework was to use those sketches as the basis for a finished drawing. This is a mash-up of things I saw at the Alamdea st market. (I demand you full-view this! Notice their hands!)
Hey I got my grades! Check it:
Writing Studio: A-
Digital Design: A
Design 1: A+
Composition and Drawing: B+
Heads and Hands: A
(cumulative GPA: 3.85)
I'm pretty happy. I'm totally laughing about the A- in writing studio (hahaha I swear I just wrote "writing stupid"on accident) but I'll take it! I also feel like shaking my fist about the B+ in comp/draw but eh it's okay, I understand it.
kay that's all I wanted to say. Back to knitting.
These are all (with the exception of the second guy) [terrible scans of!] drawings of fellow students. Friendmodeling for headsnhands. (I posed for others as well, and later had a bad head/eye-ache from having stared into the bright modeling lamp for 30 minutes. Now I fully understand why the models take so many eye-rubbing breaks)
Show us your hands.
Okay! Here are my homework hands from the other week.
(The non-skeleton hands are from Michaelangelo sculptures. Do you recognize David's?)
And here are some in-class hands
another week of work!
The sort of thing that would take 3 seconds to do on a computer but which takes hours to make by hand. We did it the old fashioned way.
From Heads&Hands and Composition&drawing. We just finished the skeleton [we have skinny models can you tell?] and have moved on to the muscles [this guy really is that muscular, though].
(Jesus is in there somewhere, did you find him?)
Here is some more of what I've been doing.
Here is my non-straight-lines version of the spiral. Curves are harder than straight lines!
The rest of my headsnhands skulls:
The next headsnhands homework: 12 Roman statue heads with one-value shading. (There won't be class next week because of Columbus Day, so our new homework is to do 25 more of these! Ack)
We are studying the skeleton in composition and drawing. The three of these drawings that are grayer are homeworks, and the redder one is the sort of thing we're doing in class, from live models.
Digital design things.
Left: scratchboard. I wandered around the joshua tree forest in Lancaster to get the photo, and was amazed to find hundreds and hundreds of rusted-to-hell cans lying all over the place. I don't know where they could have come from. This picture shows only a small fraction of them.
Right: Groucho cube!!