Every New Beginning Comes from Some Other Beginning's End

My schedule is pretty packed this summer, but you can expect me to drop by on some Tuesdays and Wednesdays! C:

I don't really have much to say in terms of goodbyes, but I do have quite a bit to say about the radical shifts in my life right after high school ended.

For me, summer vacation started out in a pretty interesting manner. I stayed at the racetrack until 3:30 AM, and probably didn't go to bed until 5 because I still had to shower and upload photos onto the laptop. As a result, I overslept for my first class of the summer. Coincidentally, it was taught by my Senior project interview, Mr. Weston. He was pretty cool about it (he simply went on with his lecture when I walked in). But what a way to make a first impression college student: late from oversleeping from a wild party from the night before, and bringing in the incorrect art supplies. T_T

Today, we learned about the wonderful things we can draw by using the cube. You heard me. Cubes. Like many of you, I was pretty skeptical about this concept. It sounded so... basic. And it was basic. You got your pen, you got your sketchbook, and steady hand. Then you draw your cube. Done. Well, you'll be surprised what happens to that six-sided prism when you put it in linear perspective. In three point perspective, none of the edges have the same length. Nor were the angles of the edges the same. Eliminating my old habits during those four hours drove me nuts. I didn't exactly blow it, but Mr. Weston had to point me in the right direction once or twice (I have a feeling I could have avoided this if I came to class in time).

Once the art of drawing cubes was mastered, you can do pretty amazing things with it. Most of what I learned has a lot of art jargon in it, so I'll simplify things for you. You can draw anything starting out with the cube, or rather the elongated/modified cube. You can draw anything from something as simple as a pencil case to something as complex as an animal skull. And Mr. Weston made it look so simple! As it turned out, it was really that simple. It just required me to practice (not a problem, because I love drawing), and follow directions (might be a problem, because it didn't occur to me that I needed to take notes until halfway through the class).

Overall, the class was incredibly different from high school art classes. For starters, you actually get instructions (!) on how to draw. What used to happen was this: the art "teacher" gives you an assignment and some examples of the more successful assignments, provides the art supplies, then lets the entire class loose to do their own thing. Maybe if this was an advanced class, this class structure would work. But we're talking about students who probably had no idea about how to properly handle the materials. They developed their own ways of using the materials. Most of those techniques are inefficient and unprofessional, but since no one really taught them any better, they stuck with it. I grew up with the assumption that this was the way that school art classes were structured, and was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case for art college courses.

It's not to say that learning to draw on your own is a bad thing though. It is just that I believe that you need to get pointed in the right direction before experimenting. At least in my academic life, art was taught in exactly the opposite way. Experimentation came before education. You need to know the rules before breaking them, or as Mr. Weston said, "You need to develop the norm before deviating from it".

Oh, wow. Day one of summer and I already wrote this much about it! I suppose I am already writing too much for an informal blog response, so I'll leave it at that. (For now. )

I've spent enough time talking about me. What did the rest of the Myth to Sci-Fi crew do for the first day of summer?

-Tiffany

P.S. Mr. Feraco, how will it be until they deactivate our school accounts? This is one of the only places other than Facebook that I can keep in touch with Myth to Sci/Fi classmates.