Old year out, new year in...

Well, goodbye 2007. It's been another mix of good and bad for the year in the old White household:

• Got together with Hottalker friends at Oaklawn race track
• Won award at National Arts Program art contest
• Dad's wife died
• Mom's husband in near-fatal motorcycle accident (fyi, he has a titanium rod in his leg now, and is going back to work this month, good news for them)
• Hubby's dog died
• Quit my job to focus on school
• I finished the first year of school
• Hubby finished first term of school
• Jeep broke down, Hubby fixed, broke down again, Hubby fixed, broke down again... I think Hubby's planning a bonfire....

On that note, the new year may be starting out with a new car (new used car that is). We are planning on picking it up tomorrow, buying it from one of our college professors. Then there's an auto auction in a couple weeks across the road from our house, we hope to pick up another car or two there. We'll see.

Anyway, here's a rundown of the classes I took this year:

• Drawing I ... got an A
• Intro to Computer Graphics... A
• Digital Publishing I... A
• Business & Professional Communications (speech) ...B
• Life Drawing I ... A
• Art Appreciation ... A
• US History to 1876 ... A
• US History since 1876 ... A
• Intro to Psychology ... B
• English Composition I ... A
• Computer Illustration ... A
• Painting I ... A

Not bad for one year's worth of work I guess. And what did I learn from it?

I learned that when reading the name of the class and the description, what actually happens in the class may be something completely different. Take my Computer Illustration class for example- when I think of "illustration", images come to mind of artsy graphics in magazines and print ads, or what we once called "commercial art." BUT, the projects we were told to create in this class wound up being PowerPoint presentations and old-fashioned slide animations. We did have one project where we had to use Adobe Illustrator to draw things, but it wasn't the focus of the class as I had assumed it would be. By the way, the speech class was also about using PowerPoint, and the Computer Animation class (which I haven't taken yet) covers using the current industry-standard programs such as Flash to create animations. So my point is, I was a bit disappointed by the Illustration class.

Same for the Life Drawing class. There are certain proportions of how to draw features of the human body, such as... you can draw a straight line downward from the pupils of the eyes down to the corners of the mouth... it's a measurement that is exact on almost every face. Or that the space between the eyes is the exact length of one eye. It was the type of things I expected to learn more about in the Life Drawing class. NOPE. The instructor I had more or less just had us drawing the model's nude body, with very little instruction from him. I'm going to wait until I get up to UNT before taking another Life Drawing class, maybe I'll get more out of it up there.

I am proud of myself for the English Comp class though. Taught by the head of the English Dept and he was a real stickler for grammar and details (which should be obvious), and I haven't had an English class in, oh I don't know, like 17 years, but I managed to make an "A" on the papers I wrote. I saw that a lot of students made "C"s in the class, so I was happy with my grade. Not that you can tell from the bad grammar I use here on my blog, lol. And not that you could tell from all the red marks he put on my papers to correct my mistakes, it looked like the papers were bleeding, haha. Apparently I'm bad about "modifiers" and "comma-splices" among other no-nos. Oh well. We also got a 30-minute lecture on how NOT to use ellipsis marks (...), I hope he never sees my blog... he'd probably go back and change my grade, haha.

My art classes were inspiring at least. I can't help but feel like a lot of what I learned I figured out on my own during the classes, but the instructors did alter my thinking on some things so they were worthwhile. I'm curious to see if there's any difference at the university level though, if the professors actually teach or if they just point you in the direction and expect you to figure it out. But I have another year of core curriculum to finish before heading up to UNT, so the answer will have to wait.

Yuletide Greetings...

Back while I was in high school 18 years ago, my bro-in-law asked me to draw a picture for him of a cougar. He had taken a photo out of one of his hunting magazines and I drew it in colored pencil. He said he wanted to hang it in his office at work.

Well, each year at Christmas I don't have the slightest clue what kind of gift to get for him. So, this year I decided to paint another cougar for him. This one is an oil painting. Hope he likes it. And this only took two days to paint, so luckily I'm getting faster!

Merry christmas to all of you in cyberland!!

An artist asked the gallery owner if there had been any interest in his paintings on display at that time.

“I have good news and bad news,” – the owner replied. “The good news is that a gentleman inquired about your work and wondered if it would appreciate in value after your death. When I told him it would, he bought all 15 of your paintings.”

“That’s wonderful!” – the artist exclaimed. “What’s the bad news?”

“The guy was your doctor.”

:-)

Had to have a joke, the transmission just went out on my Jeep. Great timing. Hubby's in Oklahoma visiting mom, so I had to have friends come from across town to rescue me. Merry Christmas to us!

Finished!!!...

Wednesday I finally finished the last of the murals for Leapin' Lizards. Gee, it's only taken a month & half to do 4 1/2 walls, since I was there every free moment that I wasn't in school. But you can tell I was getting pushed for time on the last couple, they're not as detailed as the fish mural was, and so they're not as realistic. You can really tell on the princess in the window that I painted last, I had to do her and the banner and paint a table with zebra stripes in another room all in the same day, so they were pretty rushed.

I had already painted the background scenery a week earlier, so I just had to paint a quick banner. Which might I add, is not easy to draw freehand on a large scale like this and try to make it look even on both sides!

So Wednesday when I was finished painting I was recruited to help with the make-ready on the rest of the building. The owner's been paying Hubby to help with the construction stuff, along with a whole host of other folks scrambling to get it all done, so she said she'd pay me to help too. She has 22 kids parties scheduled for this weekend starting Friday (today). On Wednesday evening she had the city Health Inspector come do an inspection, and the inspector was brutal. She gave a whole list of things to the owner that needed to be fixed before the business could be opened on Friday. So Hubby and I stayed until midnight Wednesday, came home for a few hours, and then went back early Thursday morning to continue working. My job for the most part was caulking- EVERY SINGLE NAILHOLE AND EDGE SEAM in the roughly 20,000 sq ft building had to be caulked. Especially the kitchen area, which has a zillion seams everywhere, and some back behind large kitchen equipment that had to be moved, it was such a pain. As I sit here typing my hands STILL have black caulk on them that I can't get off!

Anyway, I can't even begin to describe the pandamonium Wednesday night through Thursday night, with everyone running around like their heads are cut off, trying to get it all done before the Health inspector came back for the final inspection that night. They also had their Fire Inspector come out at the same time to add to the chaos.


And one more note about the Health inspection... it's almost ironic how many UNSAFE acts we were doing to satisfy the items on their list. Here I was after getting hardly a wink of sleep, up on a rickety ladder 25 feet in the air trying to spackle holes in the tops of the walls, and straining ourselves moving heavy equipment in the kitchen area, and running my fingers along edges of sheet metal to smooth the caulk on them (yes I did cut myself, luckily the caulk sealed the cut!)

But it's all worked out in the end and the inspections were passed. Last night Hubby and I went to the sports bar to watch Denver lose and I had several Hot Toddys. There's still some small things that need to be finished on a later day. When we go up there again, I'll take some photos of the rest of the building with the games and inflatables and everything. It's a pretty neat place.


And most importantly, it's ready to be opened! Hubby and I are taking a friggin' DAY OFF today and doing absolutely NOTHING! No schoolwork, no construction, no painting!!! Just lounging around in our pajamas, playing Madden football and Pogo games, hot cocoa in hand.

I stand corrected... it is 14,000 sqft of carpet. And, it appears it's not a screwup by Home Depot, it's the contractor she gave $10,000 to who has run off without providing the carpet... hmmmm. Last I heard she was calling the police. Poor girl, we can relate having had crooked employees take us to the cleaners too in the past. I swear, the small business owner has a tough enough time trying to make it in this day and age that's controlled by multi-conglomerate mega corporations, the little guys don't hardly have a chance anymore. Then, to be taken advantage of to your face. For shame.

Almost done with this one...

I forced myself to make this horse more "cartoonish" than I normally would, in the interest of time. They're opening this business day after tomorrow, and the owner's in a mad rush to get everything finished. Due to a mixup with Home Depot the poor woman doesn't even have her carpet yet... and we're talking like 200 yards of carpet that's going to have to be laid Monday! Then she has a rock-climbing wall, inflatables, all kinds of stuff to be put in place. I think her first kids party is scheduled for Tuesday. Spastic may be an understatement.

Not to mention I still have to paint a princess looking through a window in this same room, and paint a banner over the doorway.

Oh yeah, and it's finals week in college.

By the way, that's not red blood spurting out of the knight's head, it's a plume of red feathers, lol.

Steven Spielberg I am not...


As one of our last projects in my Computer Illustration class we had to make an animation. From scratch. Without Flash. You know, making a moving animation the old style way, frame by frame, like what we used to do with the old flipbooks. Except we were making frames on the computer and a GIF Builder program puts them together for you. It was still a lot of work making each individual frame. I only had 2 days to put this together, so it's a bit rough. I would have liked to have moving legs etc. to make it look like the people are walking but just didn't have time for it. The main point of the project was to have objects move across the screen, using between 50-100 frames. Mine took about 69 frames to create.

Also, another instruction in the project was to choose an obscure November "holiday," one other than Thanksgiving. There's some weird so-called holidays in Nov such as "Sandwich Day" and "Have a Bad Day Day". I chose "World Hello Day" for my animation.




Most students were struggling with trying to draw people on the computer, and wound up using stick figures. Screw that... I used South Park as an inspiration and found photos of celebrities instead. Nobody seems to mind mocking them. So, we have PeeWee, Tom Cruise (notice the snob doesn't say hello back), Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, Soprano's Garafino, and Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers from MASH. Hey it's the best I could come up with on short notice.

House of art...

Today our painting class took a field trip to the Rachofsky House in Dallas. Howard Rachofsky had this house built primarily for housing his extensive art collection. He no longer lives in the house, it's only there for the artworks.

It was a gorgeous day by the way...

Anyway, the house displays contemporary art. Because we were given a pamplet that has photos of all the artworks, I took few photos myself. But, here's a fun sculpture of molars outside:

The next photo I was taking of this sculpture that was in front of a mirror for a double image, and wound up getting myself in the shot too.

Man, everything inside the house was pristine white, to give it a museum type quality of environment, so that color wouldn't detract from the views of the artworks. We were instructed on the rules of visiting, and believe me we were afraid to even move inside the place!

Not to mention it felt kind of weird walking around a person's house while they weren't home, even if they don't live there. Go figure.

Dragon dragging on...

Worked on the dragon today. Almost done, still need to finish his back leg, tail, and horns. Then he has smoke coming out of his nostrils but I'll probably do that last.

And the next person who pokes their head in the room and says "Aren't you done with that wall YET?" will wind up wearing whatever color I happen to be painting with at that particular moment...