Colorado

Colorado is cold. I can't resist staying in the warm lounge, especially since it has unlimited hot chocolate.

Watercolor pencils


Pastels

"God Bless Us Every One!"

As part of our effort to get some Atlanta culture, Pat and I joined Liz and Chris Schwitzer and went to the Shakespeare Tavern to watch the performance of “A Christmas Carol.” The theater itself is quite spectacular. Inside it I was instantly transported back in time to Elizabethan London. The theater even has two levels and made beautifully out of wood, reminiscent of original Globe theater. The performance was truly enjoyable and would have made Dickens proud. It even included some singing of ye ole Christmas favorites, which softened even my inner Scrooge.

Not only did they put on a wonderful show, but at the Tavern there is also the opportunity to enjoy some wonderful foods. On the menu for this performance were some traditional holiday favorites, and I partook of some yummy Shepherd’s Pie before the performance, and some gingerbread and hot apple cider for dessert at intermission. Pat had the Cassoulet (which I have no idea what it was) but looked tasty too.

I look forward to maybe seeing some other upcoming performances. Shakespearean classics like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" are playing in early 2009.

It was nice to hang out with fun people and I would highly recommend the Shakespeare Tavern to any other ATL peeps!

I give the Shakespeare Tavern four and a half out of five Renee ratings of AWESOME-ness

Adobe Power!

With the premiere of the newest version of the Abode suite of programs, CS4, came a drastic drop in prices. Even the student rates were reduced, making the Adobe programs only moderately outrageous. (I shouldn't complain though, the software does basically everything short of backflips...) So, finally, i purchased my first piece of legal software. It is a long time coming too. I have been using CS1 and Dreamweaver 8 at home, but mostly going to school to use the more up to date programs. The files were especially tricky in Illustrator, working from one version to the next, if i chose to work partly at home.

I am anxious to try it out, but i need to get my laptop fixed before i install (and i may try to upgrade the operating system), so i am holding off for what probably will be a week or so. However, i did learn some about the new programs through the Adobe presentation at SCAD-Atlanta toward the end of the quarter. The suite is even more fantastic than the last go-around, CS3, (no surprise!). In Photoshop CS4 the 3D upgrades were pretty impressive, (although i doubt i would use them). The program also has the ability to rotate your image canvas while working now. There are also advances in the automerging/photomereging that were demo-ed (so awesome!). All this made me very excited, and i will probably blog later about all the other cool things i find out about the programs, but, all in all, I am just happy to be current! Yay!

Final Projects

Concepts and Composition: Create surface designs to apply to a box in a christmas/holiday theme.

Box #1: I created this pattern in Illustrator. I tried to use Argyle as an inspiration for a playful Christmas pattern.

Box#2: This is the artwork I created to wrap around the below box. This was definitely another experimental piece. I drew the image in pieces, inked each with a thin Micron, and then brought the images in Photoshop to assemble and color in a messy style. The messy style of coloring originated when i was creating a quick color comp in the computer. I liked the way I was coloring outside the lines-- I was concentrating on just getting a sense of how the colors interacted together at this point-- and thought it went well with the rough sort of inking i did. I decided to carry it through into the final image.

I cut glass, and made a sort of shadow box for the lid.

Drawing for Sequential Art: create at least 5 images that illustrate a story of a character stealing something from another character. A struggle will ensue. Must demonstrate 2 examples of each of the three types of perspective, at least one panel of dramatic lighting, contain an animal, be set in a specific city, etc.

For this project, i tried the same coloring style as i did with Box#2. I had a lot of fun coloring it. Once i was done drawing the images, i basically reverted back to my childhood and colored it without being mindful of the lines i had carefully created.

Refelections at the end of another Quarter...

Another quarter has ended. It was a good quarter, all in all. I never feel like it is long enough to accomplish everything i want. Ten weeks go by quickly, and no matter how hard i plan ahead, it always seems like there is a mad dash at the end of the quarter to get all finals completed (er, "mad dash" = many sleepless nights and many shared pepperoni and sausage pizzas with Pat).

I took two classes this quarter, one being Drawing for Sequential Art. My goals in taking this class were to learn new ways of approaching the figure, and learning human anatomy...and i have always been intrigued at learning techniques used by comic artists, such as inking techniques, so i am glad those things were covered as well. I think i made much improvements with the gesture, what we focused on most in class, and what can be the trickiest to capture. I was also overloaded with anatomy, and while i think i made a lot of good observations and improvements, i still have a lot of work to do to get better at it. I also learned a lot about applying line weights, and I am still practicing that, and hope to get better with it.


One of the things we did in this class were ink studies of the live models. These were done at home from our studies of the figure that we did in class.I think this was somewhat a break-through quarter for me in my other class, Concepts and Composition, as i tried out some new things with my work, style-wise. I have known for a long time, that i am not really a precision artist, and i kinda went with that notion this quarter and experimented. During the first part of the quarter, Julie, the instructor, had us focus on concepting and thumbnailing. She explained that if we keep our ideas small (more to the size of our actual thumbnail, bc i had been getting increasingly large in this stage), great things can come from that kind of freeness, and, boy, was she right. I think this let me get a little looser, and then i started liking the quirkiness of the images i was coming up with this way. It worked, and more importantly, they were more ME.

These were the images i created for the first assignments. They were illustrating scenes from the story of Baba Yaga . I stuck pretty close to the "doodles" I did in the thumbnailing stage because i was fond of the imperfect shapes that were created. Then, in the final stages of the finished Photoshop versions, I added some textures and patterns, from things like lace, and scrapbooking paper found at Michael's, fabric, and patterns i created in Adobe Illustrator.