Take a Seat, Not That One(That's The Still Life).

    I just wanna take a few words to mention September 11th 2001, and thank any of you who are emergency responders/military reading this for risking your lives for hundreds, maybe thousands of people. There may be a time in your life that you will be called to respond to a devastating terrorist attack or mass shooting.  We respect/thank you and those who fought the flames, and fought through the smoke for those who could not help themselves in New York City during the terrorist attack on 9/11/2001. 

   On this cool summers autumn day, we were in drawing class , as we are every Thursday. We have finally moved from boxes to chairs! Hallelujah! Today's exercise was to draw the negative shapes first, then fill in the positive planes. If you don't know what negative space is: if you put your hand up and touch your pointer finger with your thumb, and make a " Okay" hand signal , the empty space in the middle  of your thumb and pointer finger  is called negative space.

[Allison's negative space focused drawing]

   
     As "skilled" artists as we are, drawing negative space first throws the drawing a little off, due to the fact you can underestimate the scale that you are drawing at. My first drawing was too narrow in some places and fell off the page on one side. My second drawing fell off the page on the top and on the bottom. I pay attention to negative space already, but I don't draw negatives first naturally. I was taught, that if you cant figure out the shape of something on the first few tries, focus on drawing the negative space, it will give you a better view of what the edges are suppose to look like. It worked like magic. I concentrated on the pupil of an eye less often to figure out where its looking, I focus on what shapes the whites(or negative space) of the eye look like.

Sorry for boring you, here are some of our class drawings.

-Allison

    I was having trouble when we first started with our drawing class, I felt like I could draw much more complex things, but for the life of me I couldn't draw the box before me. when I took the time to sit and see what was before me though I became much more satisfied with what I was producing by the second class. Now into the third class and our instructor decides to mix it up, and asks us to draw in a way I don't typically start with.
 

[Cody's negative space focused drawing]

    As Allison before me I had been told to watch the shape of my negative spaces while drawing before, but never to draw them exclusively. I actually feel like I ended up with more accurate drawings working in this manner, and may continue to start with all negative drawings for other assignments.

-Cody

    A couple bits of info here at the end, Allison now set up the blog so that ANYONE can comment on our posts. With our without an account! So I encourage anyone reading here to leave a comment about anything, or just say hello.

    Also if anyone is interested in getting an email whenever we update the blog so you can see what we're posting, we can add you to the "mailing list". So if you would like to get email updates you can leave us your email either in the form of a comment here or on any post, or if you'd rather keep your address private you can email me at caveryart001@gmail.com.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. " -Edgar Degas

"Is This a Doughnut or a Bagel"

      During our painting class today, we broke up the time for two paintings. They were the same subject but with different techniques. The objects we painted were rings of foam under strong lighting. I had a good time painting, I'm getting used to oils. Yet I'm having some difficulty figuring out a good ratio of solution and oils for a base layer and which paints are transparent. A lot of people told me my first painting looked like The Lord of the Rings movie, meaning the atmosphere and the resemblance of a ring I had painted. (See below) It honestly looks like a Panera Bread painting of a bagel...

[Allison's first donut]

     As far as friends go, a bunch of people found out I'm not 18. They don't think I'm silly like some other kids that are new at the school. I told them who else was older among the new students. Also they knew who I was without knowing who I was, as in someone is talking about me and they know the description of who they were talking about but not who I actually was. I'm not surprised, Cody has classes with people who have been there for more than a year. It could pass around during conversation.

[Allison's second donut]

     Anyways, English class is alright we are reading lots of essays. Tomorrow is drawing class, we get to draw something other than boxes now! 

-Allison

    I'm actually learning a lot from doing these paintings of geometric shapes we've been working on. If you were to look at them in order, you may not see a straight progression of quality, but I take something different away from each of them.

[Cody's first donut]

    While working on my first one today I ended up having way too much paint on the canvas, and with oils it makes it very difficult to put any more paint on without everything smoothing all together. For the second painting today we were assigned to only use 5 different values to represent all of the form in front of us.
 

[Cody's second donut]

    I ended up having a few too many values being very close to each other, which makes it harder to create contrast. I'm trying to remember to slow down, and work in a particular sequence while painting in oils. I really don't like the way the black, and white one looks at all compared to the raw umber, and white one either. Lessons learned.

-Cody

"Learning is fun!" -Us I guess...

David, oh David, who is sculpting thee

To: Art school

    It's Tuesday, and here's your routine insight to our hopes and dreams. Even though our scheduled posts aren't on track yet, school hasn't been in session two Mondays in a row, so we can't talk about art on a Monday yet. BUT TUESDAY, we're talking about Tuesday.

       
    It was our first sculpture class, our teacher got us right into sculpting, which was great. We had to replicate the "Statue of David's" eye. Everyone was sculpting the same thing, most looked really close to the original, but so different from other students' work. I've never sculpted before, I've only made some ceramic cups and an ashamed Pooh Bear piece, which I wouldn't have called sculpture. I did alright for a first try, we will post pictures tomorrow!(hopefully) 

     
    My wallet is also more empty today, I had to spend $51 on a tool and a little bit of clay... 

Send help, and Michael's gift cards.

With love,

-Allison

Painting 1...

    I've taken many "painting 1" classes or differently named equivalents over the course of my education, so I was a bit wary of having to take another. I was told they wanted to teach me how to paint well and correctly so that I could move forward knowing how to paint correctly.

    It turns out that I won't be wasting any time, because though I may have painted before, I've never used oil paints before, nor have I had a room full of students who want to learn how to learn just as much as I do. Not everybody is in the same place with their art, and It's humbling to be put into a room of people who a lot are just as good if not better than myself at what we're doing.

    I'm going to try and focus as much as I can on actually observing what's in front of me and taking my time. I've always had a problem with not knowing how to proceed, or feeling like I'm done long before I ever reach a "presentable" point.

    

    So we'll see how that goes...

-Cody

Media introduced today: Oils

Difficulty level: fairly easy if you're an artist

Difficulty level today with a new medium: what the freak am I doing.

So we used oils today. I have never used them in my entire life. Some emotions I went through today while learning oils:

Confidence

Unsure

Sadness

Hopeless

Frustrated

Rage

Sobbing (internally)

I realized a lot of these kids in our class are pretty good, it bothers me though that they are 18 years old. And here I am. With an Associates in Visual Arts , and their work is just as good, or better than mine. Although there's always that one kid that isn't that great, and you're like " alright! I'm not the worst!" It gives me hope 

Side note: I played a mean game of ping pong today between classes. Plus my English teacher is super rad and she's like " you're artists you don't wanna be here, I get that. We can do whatever we want" 

Here is my oil painting it's the same subject as Cody's , but in a different location. It looks pretty lame now that I see it in a photograph.

-Allison

Feel free to leave us a comment, or discuss our work and all that's going on with us. We'll be trying to post at least Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday regularly so keep an eye out.

"Remember, only you can prevent wildfires." -Smokey the Bear