6 days to go!

... till I get to go home!

Yesterday I sold my poem/illustration project to a guy who wanted to give it to the girl who wrote my poem. It was my first art sell! I was pretty excited.

In other news, today my Illustration class is working on the mural for the men's homeless shelter. Saturday, Harry and I are going to the Art Institute of Chicago!

Couldn't have asked for a better way to end the last week of school.

For a little touch of retro, here's one of the last projects I did last year in 3D Design.

I call them the ''Van Gogh shoes''.

The Sharpie King

You must go to this link and look at this man's art - made entirely out of sharpie markers!

http://blog.sharpie.com/2008/11/meet-the-sharpie-king/

Graphics: Photo composite project

I really loved this project we just did for Graphics. I chose an art history theme (in case you couldn't tell... hehe).

The seascape/silhouette is a Monet painting called San Giorgio Maggiore at Twilight (or ''at dusk''), the statues on the beach are the Venus of Milo and Michelangelo's David, the paintings in the water are Man in a Red Turban by Jan Van Eyck and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, there's also Da Vinci's Last Supper and lastly The Great Wave by Hokusai.

No, the bench, beach, and boat are not from famous pieces of art. I just added them in for flair.

A word of advice for artists...(or anyone, really)

If for some reason you feel tempted to punch holes in matte board using a handheld hold puncher... DON'T.

I totally just put a crack in my thumbnail and it's terribly painful.

That is all.

The Twist of Friday

So Friday was the day of the other trip to Chicago. I didn't go. But I found that I can't regret this decision in the least because of how eyeopening the past two days were. (*quick note: this is more of a personal entry, but there are some art-related elements included)

Thursday was simply a ''bad day'' for me. I went to bed in a bad mood and woke up feeling tired and downhearted. This feeling of depression lasted most of the day. My sister called me and invited me to stay with her at her apartment in Urbana then find something to do around Champaign the next day. I told her I couldn't because I had to go to Chicago on Friday, but I knew if my depression subsisted that I wouldn't be in the mood for anything. Hoping her company (and the company of her cats) would cure me, I left Thursday for her apartment, forsaking the field trip but hoping for a better emotional turnout.

It did improve my mood a lot to be somewhere else, I soon found. My sister, her friend Justine, and I ate dinner on the gorgeous U of I campus quad and watched a cute Hayao Miyazaki movie called Ponyo afterward.

After sleeping in the next day, my sister and I went back to the quad to take a walk. I completely forgot that it was the National Day of Silence until we stopped at a Day of Silence booth where we were given rainbow ribbons and PRIDE bracelets to wear.

Now, I know this is probably a touchy subject for Olivet students because of the way Christians may view the LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) community. But I don't care. The point of the Day of Silence isn't to promote or support those lifestyles - the point is to draw attention to the bullying and violence inflicted upon LGBT people for simply being themselves. It's an issue that is very close to my heart and something I am going to stand up for in whatever way I can...
because no one deserves to be treated that way.

After stopping at the booth, I decided to text my friend Harrison (who's an art history/photography major at U of I) and tell him that I'd love to go to the ''Break the Silence'' rally at 5 in front of the Alma Mater. That was also a very moving event and I was so happy to be there and witness it. I've never met a nicer group of people. Afterward, Harry and I, along with a few of his friends, walked around Campus Town looking for a place to eat. There we saw scattered elements of the Boneyard Art Festival that was happening that weekend.

I went back to Olivet after dinner and talking, feeling refreshed and invigorated with all that I'd seen and experienced.

btw, here's a great picture that Harry took at the rally

Field trip, sketchbook, more news

Yesterday was the field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago with my non-western art class. Here are a couple of my favorite photographs that I took that day:






As you can probably tell... I liked the dinosaurs the best. But the Ancient Americas exhibit was awesome, too, it was just harder to get good pictures because of the dim light.

Sadly, I haven't been very active with my sketchbook lately. The last major thing I did with it was the visual file project/scrapbook project for Illustration. Each of us were to hunt and gather images that we found appealing, then organize them into categories (eg. shape, color, emotion), and put them in a scrapbook. Instead of making a separate book, I just pasted mine into my sketchbook and wrote little notes about the images in the empty space that was left. Here are my favorite pages:


In other news, I got an email yesterday saying that I'd been accepted to the Honors program at St. Cloud! I've been waiting 3 weeks to hear, and I'm so excited about the news. That means I get to take my gen-eds through the Honors department, so classes are smaller and more hands-on. It'll be just like taking classes at Olivet in that sense.

What else is there to say but I think April is my favorite month. If not out of the whole year, then at least my favorite so far.

Art show!

Here is everyone's artwork from the show we just had at Higher Grounds:

*note: I would have LOVED to get closer and better pictures for the sake of the detail work in many of these pieces, but the light in the place + my camera would not allow it. Sorry!
*other (slightly funny) note: When Kayla hung her poem up beside my piece, I noticed that it was a LOT longer than the poem that I used. Then when she read it aloud, it was almost a completely different poem! But luckily, the lines I put from the poem onto my piece were lines that she kept the same - what a fortunate coincidence, I thought.

In other news...

Less than a month left of school and SO many exciting things are happening! Where to start??

Okay, I'll start with the short term. This is going to be a great week for 3 reasons!

1) My Non-Western Art class is going on a trip to the Field Museum in Chicago this Tuesday to check out the African/Mesoamerican/Native American art
2) The poem/illustration exhibition at Higher Grounds Tuesday night
3) Trip to the River North art galleries in Chicago on Friday with my Illustration class

Yay for field trips to Chicago!

Also, my presentations for both my art history classes went extremely well! I got a 94-ish% on my Fra Angelico presentation for western art history and a 100% for my presentation on Buddhist sculpture in non-western art history.

Lastly, I've been officially accepted to the Art History Major (BA) at St. Cloud State University! I'm signing up for classes there within a couple weeks, too. I already have a few classes set up, including Baroque/Rococo art and European 19th century painting/sculpture. Tomorrow I find out if I made SCSU's Honors Program, which I adamantly hope I did. So I'm almost set and ready to go, I just need to figure out what I need for the Spanish major, too. Oh, and I'm also going to be an art minor. :)

I'll update again once I find out more about my classes and such. The next project I'm working on is called ''A Week in the Life''. We're making books about, well... a week in our lives. It can be past, present, future, or even made up. I have a good idea for mine, but I still need to start the sketches. I think it's due really soon, so I have a lot of work to do.

Poem/illustration project

Phew! Can't believe it's been over a month since my last update! No time for beating myself up about it, though. I've have a lot to get through!

One of the most important projects of late is the poem/illustration project. Each of us were given a poem from a student in one of the English classes and our job was to create a piece of art for that poem. The poem I received is called ''Missing'' by Kayla Koury. It goes like this:

I went to a land of dreaming spires,
But I didn't want to leave.
To think I would not love being there,
I suppose it was naive.
My heart aches to be away,
like a long arm in a very short sleeve.

For at the time,
I did not understand
that the land of brats and cheese
was not my true homeland.
For in this place I felt a peace
as if my right was holding my left hand.

I would have loved to linger and dream,
I wanted to stay there forever.
I'm not crossing my fingers behind my back,
I'm not playing tricks or being clever.
Somehow it just felt right.
To come back home, I was okay with never.

After meeting with Kayla, I discovered that the Land of Dreaming Spires is another name for Oxford in England, where she studied abroad last semester. Then it became my task to create a piece of art that I felt expressed the essence of her poem in the best way. I decided the feeling of the artwork should be dreamlike - playing off the ''dreaming'' spires idea and the line ''I would have loved to linger and dream''. And of course, the person dreaming had to be Kayla. After a few sketches of ideas, this is basically the composition I came up with:

I got a chance to ask her what her favorite landmarks were that she visited during her trip, and she mentioned the Radcliffe Camera Library at Oxford, the Bodelian Library, the Roman aqueducts at Segovia, Stonehenge, and she also mentioned that she loved the green countryside of England, so I tried to incorporate each landmark in some way. Anyway, I am more or less finished with the project as of today, and this is what it came out to be. It's done mostly in oil pastel with some colored pencil and acrylic paint.

I'm getting it matted tomorrow and will hopefully also get a frame soon. We're having a showing of the art and reading of the poems at the Higher Grounds cafe on Tuesday, April 13... can't wait! (I hope Kayla likes it.)