Ellipse Hand Sketches

These sketches are from last week's drawing homework. We have been working with ellipses and perspective. What else is relevent to these... they were drawn with NeoColor which is a lovely tool that has a lot of versitility with mark quality. Its downfall is the fact that it is wax based and therefor cannot be erased.




Enjoy!

I will try to keep updating often like I have been the past week or two, and hopefully I will have time to write a little about my experiences so far. So keep your eyes peeled for that toward the end of the week.

La Jetée

In 1962, a Frenchman named Chris Marker released his film La Jetée. The film is a series of still images, except for a single filmed shot, that tells a story about time travel in a post-nuclear war world. An unnamed man is sent back in time in search for a cure to the world's contemporary problems. On these journeys back in time, the man falls in love with a girl who he vaguely remembers from the time before the war. I will stop there, but if you would like to find out more here are a pair of links to help you out with that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Jetee

and

http://imdb.com/title/tt0056119/

We were given an assignment to make our own film in the La Jetée style which would be based on a series of subtitles from the movie. Coinciding with this, we were reading an article on copyrights and plagiarism, so we had to include images that were not our own, incorporating them into the film as if we had taken them ourselves. It is a very large Quicktime movie file, so I would advise following the download link instead of playing it directly in your browser (please have some patience with the download time). Also, it is a proprietary Quicktime file, so you will need Quicktime (available here for free) installed on your computer in order to view the movie. Without further adieu, here is the link my film: http://www.zshare.net/video/4588262359ac88/

New Drawing Showcase

Wow y'all, sorry for the lack of posts! It has been a month, but I have gotten a lot of work done in that month. Hopefully I will get a lot of that work up here in the blog. Mid-terms came and went, which were the main cause for my lack of time to put into the blog. Most of the work in this post were part of my drawing mid-term. Also, I will be finishing my 4D midterm this at the beginning of the week so be on the look out for that. So here are nine drawings. As always, click on the thumbnail for a full screen view.










There you have it! Hope you enjoy them and, of course, any comments or criticism would be great!

Final Flip Book

This is the final animation version of my flip book. I'll be adding sound tomorrow in class. That is all for now, sorry. I have to run to do some studying for art history.

http://www.zshare.net/video/38525369383e71/

Just like the last one, you should be able to watch it in your browser.

Flipbook

Here is a rough work up of a flipbook I made for 4D class. It was a real challenge to rotate it right because I wasn't allowed to use a computer in the beginning. All of the outline (and as you will see the rotation) was done by hand then we scanned the induvidual frames of our flipbook into the computer where we are now tweaking them. I added some rough color and cleaned it up a bit, but I still have several more hours of work left to do on it. I thought I would show y'all a work in progress. You can download it here: http://www.zshare.net/video/3636062b211da1/

Hopefully, everyone has Quicktime so you can view it. If not, Quicktime is free download from Apple and you can get it here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

I will post the final version of the animation when I have it completed.

Museum of Natural Histoy

These are a couple of sketches I did yesterday at the Museum of Natural History. I wish I could have spent more time exploring the museum, but I ended up staying until they closed just doing sketches. These are a handful of many, and I appologize for the poor quality of the picture. I don't have access to a scanner regularly, so I just have to take pictures with a camera and the lighting in your rooms is horrible. Oh, and please click on the image for a larger view, it helps to see them just a little better.

First and Second Week's Work

Here is some of my work from my first two drawing classes: a handful of quick two minute gestures. Click on the thumbnail for a larger picture.






Hope you enjoy!

A Look Back

I decided to go ahead and post this even though it isn't directly part of my New York experience. This is something I wrote when my dear friend Maggie Kellet asked for my feelings on New Orleans as part of a newspaper article she was writing. I do, however, feel that some of the things I said may not have come out if I wasn't leaving New Orleans, so I think it's appropriate.

In high school there are innumerable different types of people. New Orleans is that kid who accepted you for just how you are and loved you for being that person. I love New Orleans because she loved me. When I was 11, I moved with my family to New Orleans, leaving behind the most secure childhood any kid could ask for. I had friends, a school that I liked, my entire family was within an hours drive. Then in the fall of 1999 all of that disappeared. My life was uprooted and relocated to this city that I had only visited twice. Needless to say, I was pissed. I hated every aspect of this place, nothing about it was appealing. What I wasn't willing to accept at that time was that New Orleans was now home.
At my last Sunday church gathering here in New Orleans everyone went around saying what they would miss the most about me. My dad said something a little different. Instead of telling me he was going to miss me, he thanked me for making the most of moving here. He said I embraced this place, I made it home. Sometimes all it takes to be accepted is for us to open our hearts. When I did that, New Orleans showed me who she really was. She can be demanding and nearly suck you dry at times, but the joy, uniqueness, and love she offers in return are undoubtedly worth the cost.
Growing up in New Orleans afforded me opportunities and a level of culture that exist no where else. For instance, seeing men in fish-net stockings and high heels doesn't even phase me. Oddities to other people were the norm for me. I grew up accepting homosexuals, bohemian artists and musicians, fortune tellers, goths, punks, and street kids. Who was I to say that they were any different than the rest of us? Those people were my friends. Each and every one of them were an integral part of the city that gave it its grunge: its beauty, not through glistening perfection, but through broken uniqueness. This city, these people shaped who I am today. I couldn't have asked for a better place to grow up.
As I am typing this, I am in a car, somewhere in Alabama, leaving New Orleans, heading to New York City. It broke my heart to leave New Orleans, but astonishingly, she does not have an art college. New York does, though as a city it is no substitute for my first love. There really is no other place like New Orleans. It is hard to understand from the outside. You need to live here and experience it fully to begin to understand. She is absolutely beautiful because of all the dirt, grime, corruption, humidity, destruction, and imperfection. I once heard living in New Orleans being describe as being stuck in an abusive relationship that you can't get out of because you love the abuser. That is true, but I know when She would beat the shit out of me that she loved me through it all.

Beginning

I'm all moved in. Vinicent Stabile Hall, Room 114 is my new home for the next year. Calling Stabile home will never happen because it has as much charm as a prison. Funny that I should say that because the Pratt graduate who designed it previously designed mental institutions and, you guessed it, prisons. I can't complain though: my roommate is easy going, its clean, my RA is a nice guy, and the folks on my floor are a cool collection of people from every part of the country.

The orientation schedule has been keeping me pretty busy since I got here. Every day there has been meetings (oh how I love listening to information that I have already been told!). I have been to so many "get to know you" sessions and what not. If I never have to do another ice breaker in my life that would be fine. Unfortunately, all of this orientation stuff has left me very little time to go exploring. Though I have made the walk up to Williamsburg which is fascinating (I will save its story for another time).

The big story for today was my trip to Dress Code with a couple of my class mates and one of the orientation leaders. Dress Code is graphic design firm run by two guys: Dan and Andre. The two of them attended college in California while doing design work on the side to bolster their portfolios. After college they both got senior position jobs working for MTV. After a little more than a year they grew weary of working for something as corporate and huge as MTV so they moved on and started their own studio. Today, they are finishing a book about making the transition between art school and getting a job in the real world. On top of this, they teach classes here at Pratt and continue to do graphics work for companies like Adobe and Fila. The story isn't over yet. Here is the kicker: Dan is 26 years old and Andre is only 22. I am still trying to figure out exactly how that makes me feel. It gives me hope that I too can accomplish so much at such a young age, but at the same time I feel very inadequate since I won't even be graduating until I'm 23.

I am happy to be here in New York. I miss home, but that is to be expected. Thank you for reading this, and I am going to try to update it as often as possible. Classes start Monday, so we will just have to wait and see how much free time I will have to make entries. Hopefully I will be able to keep y'all up to date and informed, maybe I'll even take some pictures one of these days.