Just some FYI school notes...

Some folks have asked how school's going, so here's a little bit about it. I'm still enjoying it, I really look forward to the days I go to class (versus the days I go to work!) And I'm still getting A's so far... although the exam I took for my Speech class has me a little scared. The class had been so easy thus far, about sending e-mails, posting text messages on the discussion board (hhmm, no experience with THAT huh? haha), reading the textbook... so I was surprised at how difficult the test was. Now I know for next time, TAKE MORE NOTES! (We're allowed to bring one page of notes to the exam) I'll find out next week how badly I did on it.

I think my drawing class is my favorite. The only thing is that we keep drawing still-lifes over and over. There's a big closet in the classroom full of all sorts of odds and ends that the instructor pulls out and arranges for us to draw. For example:

Here she had a lamp (minus the shade) and an old ram's skull for us to draw... interesting combination. By the way, yes it was drawn completely FREEHAND, in 2 hours with willow charcoal. Plus you can't tell the size but it's HUGE... on 24"x36" newsprint paper (okay so it just seems huge to me). I only finished half the ram so you only see the one horn and barely the outline of the other, and didn't get to the bottom of the lamp which was behind the skull... but still you get the idea. I tend to be a bit on the perfectionist side when it comes to drawing, so I'm slow, but luckily that doesn't matter to the instructor. A lot of people in the class have never drawn anything more than a stickman, so she's just happy if you can tell what her students have drawn, haha.

In my Digital Publishing class and Intro to Computer Graphics the instructors are covering the EXACT SAME THING... but with two different (but similar) programs... QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign. We're just going over typography and how to measure fonts and layouts, easy stuff since I've been creating flyers, brochures and other advertising material for several years now. I just hadn't had the opportunity to use this software, and to use a Mac. As long as you're somewhat computer literate switching to Mac is pretty simple, the shortcuts are the same, etc.

One more thing... in the Digital Pub class for our next project we have to take a quote by a famous person and give it graphic interpretation, only using FONTS and no images. I mention this only to share this quote by my favorite author, C.S. Lewis. Lewis is most famous for his Chronicles of Narnia children's books ("The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", et.al) but he was also a theologist and wrote a book called "The Problem of Pain" which explores why man has to endure pain in life. Anyway, I like this quote from the book:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures,
speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pains;
it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

I just like that quote... something to think about at times when life is difficult.