Friday Reflections

So I've decided I'm going to do a new thing on this blog which entails recording my thoughts from the past week in regards to Illustration class. Which should entail three daily assignments which theoretically is twelve hours of illustration work.

So, since last Friday, we've made a lot of changes. A whole new medium was introduced. No more just line art, no more getting by with a few Micron pens and some run of the mill paper. No, this week we expanded into the wonderful world of watercolor (I have a thing for alliteration. An affinity for alliteration, one might say).

Actually, let's just evolve this post into a list form. Because that makes more sense, right? (Right)

1. The first round of watercolor, I believe, went well. I enjoyed trying out different techniques and mixing and setting up my palette and the whole nine yards. Choosing photography wasn't super difficult and I actually enjoyed it.

2. Watercolor demands a different kind of energy. That sounds kind of hokey and not actually legitimate but when we were just doing line art, it was possible to get by with just drawing and making decisions about what lines should go where and what the thickness of the line was and what drawing technique was to be used (actually that sounds like a lot of decisions but that's fine). But now, there's so many more components to the decision making process. And one of those components involves not making a decision in a way ... it involves letting go. It involves laying down the pigment and then letting it run free. Or, in this sense, drip/absorb/dry free. But you get the gist of it.

3. I have fears of ruining the whole piece with above decisions but I'm learning to take risks in my work. I suppose.

4.  The second round of "sky dominant" landscapes didn't go quite as well for some reason. I'm really trying to get into the whole "shoot your own photography and don't illegally take someone else's work" thing so I've been using all of my own photos as reference. Which, somehow, I only have a limited number of photos of the sky.

5. Also with the second round of watercolor was the fact that I did all of them at once because I was putting off studying for my Modern Art test. (Which is a completely irrelevant detail.) But anyway, I spent about fourish hours the other day just doing watercolor and I think I got a liiiiittle bit burnt out by the end of it and didn't feel like putting in the effort to try out new techniques or mix the colors I should have and it's definitely reflected in a few of the later pieces.

6. Also #6 doesn't really make sense because I haven't blogged about round 2 so there's that. But I'll go into more detail about experimentation and techniques utilized for those watercolors on a later date. Or basically when I get my watercolors scanned in.

7. That's all for this week.