The following is just a slew of things that have crossed my mind this week and I wanted to share

1. Slew: –noun Informal. a large number or quantity: a whole slew of people.

2. Arbitrary: subject to individual will or judgment without restriction; contingent solely upon one’s discretion: an arbitrary decision; capricious; unreasonable; unsupported: an arbitrary demand for payment.

3. Vibrant: exciting; stimulating; lively: vibrant colors; a vibrant performance.

4. Dynamic: pertaining to or characterized by energy or effective action; vigorously active or forceful; energetic

5. I dislike drawing from life, aka Realism. However, today made me realize that it’ll be the best way to succeed in fine art. For whatever reason, being able to render a person, place, or thing exactly the way your eyes see it is incredibly impressive. I used a picture of myself in my last print and got lots of Oh’s and Ah’s over it. My instructor was full of praise XD *sigh* Figures.

6. I’m still sorting through what my criteria is for liking or disliking a person. Most noteable factor: my mood. If I’m in a great mood the most annoying person in the world isn’t likely to bother me. If I’m in an irritatable mood then someone I completely adore can get on my nerves. Classic womanly trait I suppose Lately though there have been more people falling into my “Don’t really care for” category and a select few that I guinely like.

7. “Back to the Basics” theme for my work. My last print for intaglio sparked a good discussion and really got me thinking. In an art class students tend to try to go very complex with their work in order to impress the teacher but in reality I think we need to spend more time on basics of design. Going into college for art, students generally go through 2-3 introductory design classes then choose the area they want to major in. I’ve noticed that by the time we’ve choosen our area of concentration we’ve forgotten most of the basics we were supposed to have mastered in the introductory classes. I memorized the Principles and Elements of Design for my foundations exam but now…I can rattle off a few of them but definitions and applications take some review XD I love Bauhaus work but I haven’t used it much for inspiration in a long time. I’m going to go back through some of my past research and start thinking about ways to combine the very basic concepts of art. Time to step back and play with squares, triangles, circles, and the primary colors!

8. I think I’ll buy all my friends the Wii game de Blob Everyone should know how to paint!

9. Figure/ground: A shape that is distinguished from the background is called a positive shape, or figure. In design, the area around a positive shape is called the negative shape, or ground. In a black and white image the white areas are positive and the black are negative. Depending on its location relative to the ground, the figure can become dynamic or static, leaden or buoyant. Cubists shattered the fixed viewpoint required for traditional perspective drawing (Launching the Imagination, Mary Stewart). The Gestalt psychologist Edgar Rubin is credited with popularizing the issue of figure-ground organization. Figure-ground organization is probably best known by the faces-vase drawing that Rubin described. I need to work on maintaining figure/ground in my work and I love Cubist art.

11. I have been having trouble just thinking up ideas for drawings lately and despite my dislike of drawing from life, I need to start working with still life’s again. During my earlier years of art classes I really disliked drawing still life’s. I thought they were boring and since they were always of items like cloth, boxes, and white paper sculptures, I found them very difficult. As of right now I think it’ll benefit me in many ways to set up some still life’s to work with. It’ll help me work on all the basic concepts of design and I won’t feel the pressure of trying to invent something out of the blue. I will also combine my love of Cubism and Bauhaus into the drawings to keep it interesting Yeps, sounds like a good summer project.

12. Main summer project: 3 DRAWINGS FOR PRINTMAKING SUBMISSION!!! These drawing will reflect the amount of information I remember from all my previous design classes so I definitely need to brush up on some things, hehe.

13. Trompe L’Oeil: From a French term meaning “to fool the eye.”

14. Gestalt Theory and Application (Gestalt psychology): THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS! According to  this theory, visual information is understood holistically before it is examined separately. We first scan the entire puzzle, then analyze the specific parts. This is one of the many things I memorized for my design tests but do not often think of when trying to design a new composition. I realized today that I haven’t thought of this subject since my first design classes at Wake Tech. If you’d asked me to discuss the principles of Gestalt today I would have blinked at you in a clueless fashion and desperately tried to come up with some BS that sounded believable XD

15. CREATING THE ILLUSION OF SPACE: I need to review all concepts involved with creating 3D space on a 2D picture plane.  I was looking through an introductory design textbook and realized how much I have forgotten XD.

16. Reticulation: the formation of a network of cracks or wrinkles; an arrangement resembling a net or network; “the reticulation of a leaf”; “the reticulation of a photographic emulsion”

17. I’m sleepy. ^-^