I'm finished...for now

YEAH!  I finished my first semester.  It was a little stressful to have classes every night, but I learned a lot.
Here is my final projects for my Design class.  The final was self portrait.  Pretty open again, but I enjoyed my results.

Bring on the ice and trees

This last weekend was a return to winter for me.  I ended my Friday night early so I could be in bed by 10pm.   Up at 5:30am Saturday morning to pull on my winter gear and head out into the not as cold as I expected morning.  Beside one detour back to my house to pick up the socks I forgot, I picked up friends at 6am in SLC and drove down to Provo for one last pick up.  Unfortunately, someone slept thru his alarm so we had to call his mom (well he left his phone there and she answered), find his address and pull him out of bed.  By this time our plans to hit up Joe's Valley were thwarted.  BUT we were determined to get our ice.  Up Provo Canyon we went to Stairway to Heaven.  This ice climb usually has somewhere between 5-7 pitches when it is fully in, but there was only 1, maybe 1.5 pitches of ice.  (It had been too warm the last week and was melting all our ice.)  So we set up a few top ropes and did laps on the ice.  I did about 3 climbs, not much, but it was enough to make me the good kind of sore.  My ice climbing is in serious need of improvement, but I'm happy to get climbing early this season.  I hope to do a lot more climbing this year than last with my new (to me) ice tools.

Photo posted by my friend Matt on SummitPost (this was not taken on Saturday)

So one advantage of climbing in Provo was that I was really close to home.  After a nap (I was so wiped out and sore) I was able to go to the last night of the Festival of Trees.  It was really fun despite my less than usual energy level.  I won 20 points from Hoopes for all the people I knew at the event and I got to hear some stellar bag-pipin'.   The gingerbread houses are not as grand as I remember from my youth, but this was my first time hearing the Salt Lake Scots Pipe Band.  They were incredible, but really who doesn't love a good bag pipe.  It might have to be a new tradition to go to the Festival the last night so I can hear the pipers.

Project #7 - Scrap Sculpture

Hello, really open project.  Some people would love projects like this, but they stress me out.  The project was to create a sculpture.  We could use any material, basically scarp.  I could use trash, metal, fabric, food, feathers, rocks, trees, sticks, spike (Land Before Time reference).  As you can see I wasn't limited.  This just makes things become difficult for me because my mind runs 500 miles an hour and I can't seem to focus it.
So after struggling for a while I came up with an idea...a tree and a pretty little birdie in it, but with some unusual tree colors and a bit larger than normal bird. I think it kind of turned out like a Dr. Seuss tree and I like it.

The Result

Art Project #6 - Related Arcs

I can't draw.  I think I may have mentioned this before - Here and sort of here (the reason for the tears).   So when my professor presented our sixth design project I instantly panicked.  Related arcs.  This project was basically drawing.  I thought this was a design class not a drawing class. 

sorry for the poor photo quality, I snapped this with my phone

We had to draw 30 thumbnails - 10 animals, 10 birds and 10 human figures.  HUMANS!  What! Aren't those like the hardest thing to draw. I won't say there were tears, but almost tears. It was the big welling up of the eyes, but no actual release of a tear (quite proud of myself for sort of holding it together). 
I had a terrible time working on this project. I spent extra time talking to the professor asking him more questions on related arcs (his first instruction was pretty vague).  I started to get it a little more with each object I would draw, but still lacking translating my brainwaves thru my hand onto paper.  Here is how things work for me.  I am not a masterful drawer.  I can't just seat down and draw something that people will recognize.  So I usually look up pictures on the WWW of what I want to draw (in their simplest format) and basically copy them.  This is how I proceeded with this project as well.  And I saved the worst for last, human figures. I was lucky to find some drawings online that I could reference and surprise I was able to make some half decent looking human figures.  Decent in the sense that they are not planes that look like whales.  I was so surprised and slightly proud of myself that even though it might not be my best drawing, I turned in my human figure drawing.