Lots of sumi-e

I was too lazy all of last week to post my pictures from my sumi-e class, so I have quite a lot of photos. I have to say that last week, I was not particularly interested in continuing with sumi-e. We drew a lot of baby chicks and grapes, which is a nice idea until you try to do that for two whole hours when you normally can't concentrate for more than 10 minutes. On anything. So, I ended up with a progression like this:

Instead of what I was supposed to paint, which looked more like this:

This week, I enjoyed myself a lot more. For starters, we were painting landscapes, which I find more interesting than chickens. More importantly, landscapes seemed to be more adaptable than chickens. When I got bored with the one she had demonstrated, I started to make some up that used the same strokes.

On top of there being more variety, I feel like I had a little more skill at drawing landscapes, which is a nice motivator! So, class ended with me buying some more xuan paper and some colors to try. Hopefully, in spite of the fact that the ink smells like extra strength bug spray, that means I'll keep going at least sometimes with this!

Sumi-e practice

After a whole lot of practice, I'm making some progress....I'm having fun with the different shades of grey, although I'm not very good at controlling them yet. I like the leaves on this, though:

But my favorite drawing so far was done entirely with the small brush that I was only supposed to use for detail. Maybe I'm better on the small scale?

Matting and Sumi-e

It's been a busy week--yesterday was my last matting and framing class, and today was my first sumi-e brush painting class.

The matting class worked out surprisingly well, considering that I screwed up my first mat for each of my pictures. In the end, though, I ended up with two pretty photos that would have probably cost me hundreds of dollars to have custom matted and framed.

And the really tricky one, painted on a ceiling tile:

My sumi-e class was fun, but unfortunately got a little long for me. It's a fun idea, and I did find it easier than regular painting. Next week I believe that we'll get to start using some color, which should be fun. This week we concentrated on painting peonies, which would have been much easier if I had more than a passing acquaintance with what peonies look like. I remembered them being a big, showy flower and otherwise went off my instructors demonstration paintings.

After a few pages of practice, I managed to make some decent flowers. Next week, I believe the plans is baby chicks--we'll see how that goes!

Framing and Matting Class...Pt. 1

Yesterday I attended the first round of a framing and matting class at Dakota County Technical College. It was just a kickoff class, getting us familiar with a lot of the terms and artistic parts of matting pictures, but it was a lot of fun! As a writer, my visual skills are not always my highest priority, which generally shows in any kind of color matching, spacial things or really anything I need to make look really nice. Because of this, the class was a mind-set change for me and it was kind of fun to look at the ways that colors and sizes of mats can change the way a picture looks. I'd honestly never paid attention to the way that a double-layered mat worked color-wise before, but I found out there's actually a lot of thought behind it. The under-layer that only shows a little bit is picked out to bring out a specific color in the photo, and it really does make a huge difference in what your eye focuses on. Also, the color of this layer should not actually touch that same color in the photo (e.g., a red mat never touches the red in the photo) because it's so hard to match the colors exactly--if they touch, it brings attention to the dissonance. The top layer, which is what you notice the most, should really have very little to do with the photo beyond not clashing, and instead should be matched to the decorating in the room the picture will be hung in. Just some interesting thoughts! Next week we'll actually get into the work of measuring, cutting and putting together the mats. I come out of the class with two matted and framed pictures, which doesn't seem like a half bad class project to me!

On a completely unrelated note, I saw yesterday that since last Thursday, my asparagus has sprouted, my peas have flowered, my potato plant is growing so big it might be trying to take over the world AND my raspberry bushes are getting berries! I figured I'd be lucky to even get some berries in the fall, but they're apparently happy where they are and want to let me know that. Give it another few weeks to a month, and I might be getting actual food out of this garden!

"Brain Rules" and pastels

Yesterday when I was looking for more glass paint, I instead found a cheap set of pastels. Remembering how much fun I had with them when I was a kid, I bought them, along with a big sketchbook. I am now slowly dying my keyboard all kinds of colors with the pastel colors that are still all over my fingers. It was still a lot of fun, but I have no more drawing skill than I did when I was a kid! I'll hope that I can acquire some with practice. Tomorrow I'll try to post some links for where I learned a few of the basics and maybe scan some of my lovely first attempts. With any luck, in a few months I can look back and see progress!

I finished the Brain Rules book by John Medina last night. I started this book for work, to try to gain some understand of the way people learn. I'm hoping to move my work into developing online courses (from writing manuals where I currently am) and I'm doing my best to understand how to make some incredibly boring procedures interesting enough for people to remember.

Brain Rules was a book that I saw recommended when browsing through Instructional Design blogs (such as this one or this one). It was advertised as an easy introduction to some important rules of how people learn, and it certainly seemed to be for me. While I'm sure this book was presented for a general audience and leaves a lot of information out (at least, if you're a psychologist or someone with a lot of knowledge in this area!) it really is a great, well-written and friendly introduction to the way people learn. He presents the material broken up into chapters of each "rule" (e.g., "People don't pay attention to boring things" or "Stressed brains learn differently") and takes into account every one of his rules throughout the book. It is filled with interesting anecdotes, spaced well to peak your interest after a more technical section, is easy to read and is continually related to the concerns of most readers. The book is also supplemented with a DVD and a website. He strongly encourages everyone to take advantage of all three media types, since the repetition and the variety will help people learn--but being the bookwork I am, I have yet to move past the book.

If you're interested in a quick, light introduction to human learning, this is a great book. It is easy to read and has a lot of practical knowledge that people should be able to enter into their own lives, whether to help their own learning or to help teach others. The tone is comfortably conversational, without the overly technical voice or the feeling of being talked down to that too many scientific books fall prey to. And for anyone interested in how the human brain works (yours or anyone elses!) it's a great, interesting read.

Winos and Painting Glasses

My roommate (who has requested to be called Steamboat Willie) and I went to a class to learn how to paint wine glasses tonight at the Lakeville Art Center. I think I expected this to be harder than it was, but it ended up being no harder than normal painting (which is still plenty hard for me!). We each made a glass and got to drink a few glasses to help "inspire our creativity." I have to say, they turned out better than either one of us expected.

To make things a little bit easier, our teacher had printed out some patterns for us that you could tape onto the inside of the glass. This gave me some good ideas, but I ended up not using it much--the paper was straight while the glass was curved, which threw off my depth perception. Truthfully, I think I painted better on the bottom of the glass, without the pattern. But, it's a comforting way to start and it helps with placement of each thing on the glass, and she said it is pretty easy to find patterns just through a Google search. I'm not finding a lot, but you could also just use stencils or a line drawing you find anywhere.

The glasses had to be washed thoroughly, then primed with something that smelled absolutely terrible, and then finally painted. I guess a lot of paints require that you bake the glass in the oven after you finish, but the kind we used just needs to sit for 10 days before being used. After the 10 days, we'll also wrap a string of beads around the stem of the glass.

The glass on the left with the grape vines is Steamboat Willie's, and the glass on the right with the daisies is mine. Not bad for our first attempts--next up will be the margarita glasses for our upcoming tequila party!