Watercolor Ain't Easy...

I can't handle these paintings. We had to do three of them and they are due tomorrow and I am only about 60% done. I had a lot of complications with the sketches and the skin tone colors. I am just not ready to turn them in yet. I need to do the third one really quick with washes first and then finish the backgrounds on the other two. I just really don't like how poorly organized this class is.

The teacher piles on projects, one on top of the other. Right in the middle of one assignment, she throws another one on us that is due a class after the one we were working on. Not to mention the end-of-class presentations on artists she wants to get through for our quiz in a week now. I really think she should do the presentations first in the beginning of the class and get them out of the way because some of us have a class 15-minutes after that one ends and need to factor in travel time and for me, dressing out time for Yoga. She seems to not understand that we don't have time to make it all the way back to the room to do work and use the materials there and to finish these in such a small time frame. She is putting too much on us at once and I have literally suffered health problems because of it. I have suffered not only a staple in the finger from that class, but also stress and lack of eating issues that could result in me having hypoglycemia. I not only have the paintings to work on for her class but also other projects and assignments or tests to study for in the others. I thought watercolor would be fun but so far it has been more hectic than even Business Communication where we actually have notes, assignments, and tests to worry about. I have been physically injured and unhealthily weak. It has not been a good semester for me.

I am waiting on going to my next class so I can come back, buy more paint, get the paintings from my car and then start painting again. Who knows if I will even have time for dinner. I might just buy a soda and fix a sandwich here or have leftover taco bell, yum....

So, when the teacher reviews come out, I am going to diss the class and its organization but leave some less than positive comments about the teacher saying that although she is passionate about watercolor and a nice person, she has difficulties perceiving the overload and unorganized layout of how she runs the class. She piles on one project after the other right in the middle of another one leaving the due dates too soon to even compile a constructive piece of work, producing lectures at the end of the class rather than at the beginning and sometimes running over time, and providing too many assignments within one semester. She needs to spread the assignments out further, work on giving presentations early, and provide a little more free time in class to work on pieces.

She can't expect creativity to just pop out at any given time we ask. It is a process that takes time to compile and perceive. We aren't robots who can instantaneously provide what she needs of us as painters. She focuses too highly on the technical side of watercolor painting such as the techniques in the beginning of the semester and not enough focus on the producing time of actual projects. Some artists work slower than others and can't be rushed so easily unlike others. Some artists take time and effort in their work rather than simply producing something out of the blue whenever she wants.

I am almost tempted on skipping tomorrow because this is just too much to handle. I really want to turn in completed works of art that I am proud to show in class rather than simply turning in a half-assed done painting that obviously looks like I needed more time to work on. It is just ridiculous her schedule. I don't see how anyone can fit within it's restrictive format.

Tumblr Sucks! So Here it is!

I am working on a Glitch Project for my New Media Art class.

Brief History of Glitch Art: Glitch art, like Pop art, is an amorphous term - a canopy who's tenants slip under and out of. These terms can be expanded to include much more than might immediately come to mind. This is because at their core they're simply a loose link to a key concept: the interest in the "mistake", the interest in "popular culture". Pop's link to culture is an important one here; it critically responds to culture primarily by appropriating it. Glitch art often has similar layers of appropriation at play. The first is the same as Pop art: the content found in many glitch works are commonly borrowed from popular culture. The second layer is the appropriation of the glitch itself. Though an artist can create/instigate glitches (s)he will often intentionally/ideologically not do this. Instead choosing to search for them by exploring the digital landscape and catching them (screen grabbing, recording, etc.) when they occur. In this way glitch art is like Pop art.

Programs used:
Final Cut Pro X
FFMPEG
AVIDEMUX

Concept: A series of memes, videos that have become viral or popular and start incorporating themselves within society or everyday speech, and distorting the popularity through errors to heavily focus or draw the viewer in more to the individuality of each video and of the glitches themselves as the glitches become more and more frequent and unrecognizable as original videos.

Society sometimes forgets that memes are not always a cluster of overpowering thoughts, but individually beautiful in their own way. And by viewing this, hopefully, the viewer will realize that this is basically the brain being overrun by fragments of memories, forgotten and distorted as if unable to remember the video in full because of the individual moments within the video that spoke louder to them than others.

This video is not finished! I still have more to do with it but enjoy what I have so far. :3 I like watching the progress heighten with each add-on.

They See Me Rollin' They Hatin'

So, after a long, stressful week of trying to finish a painting I absolutely hated, I am finally back on track with stuff I am more interested into. Right now, we are working on our Glitch Art projects where we distort videos by using programs like FFMPEG and AVIDEMUX. We data mosh two videos together, put them all together in Final Cut Pro X and then add the original sound or edited sound to it.

I am doing a concept on Popularity Beauty within Error, where I take all these videos on memes or popular videos that have gone viral and have become the mainstream overflow of the internet and data moshing them to make them seem like a clutter of information and and overload within the human mind. That with all of these popular memes out there controlling the web today, it has become this memory of distorted images and clutter within the mind and glitches within the internet. My teacher says I have a lot of great concepts but sometimes I need to push it to where people understand them better than I can explain it. Here is a sample of what I have so far. I am going to add white noise and more errors to it and kind of taking on an approach Nick Briz has done with his "A New Ecology for the Citizen in a Digital Age." I think it's a beautiful vid and a great example of Glitch Art. Youtube it!

And in Watercolor I am working on a series of three different paintings where the overall concept relates to all three of them. My concept for that one is taking the deaths of pets and relating them within the human condition. We always say that our pets are like family, that they are our babies, our loved ones we can't live without but then we go and do stuff like flush them down the toilet, euthanize them, and sacrifice them or kill them for rituals and cruel pranks. So I have used a lot of perspective and foreshortening in my three thumbnails and having a goldfish guy coming out of the toilet, an old dog man holding a syringe and a black cat slashing his hand in a Satanic ritual. I am going to work on it in Gouache because I really love it. You can get the vibrant full colors as well as transparent in it and it is a lot easier to do both than with transparent. I am working on the thumbnails right now in watercolor. 

Also in my Watercolor Midterm Critique, the teacher told me I am a natural watercolor painter and one of her bests this semester. I was even a little shocked by that. She said I had great use of color, composition, and values. The only thing I need work on in that class are the concepts. And sometimes feels like I am a little restricted in my use of topics and ideas in that class with all of the assignments she puts on us, sometimes two at a time which is just an overload for me. I really need to do one thing at a time and one right after the other. Kind of like how I eat my food, one item at a time. xD LOL

I have been pretty busy and swamped with everything going on and was actually sick from the stress last week and wasn't able to sleep well for two nights in a row. Now I am well rested and have a lot of energy. I have been watching Pewds and Cry play Lucius and I really want to play it now. Pewds is playing Shadow of the Collosus and it is just like the game Ico I use to play with my friend Katie when we were younger. We loved doing the pelvic thrust jump and fooling around. xD Lol but I think SOTC has much better graphics and a beautiful ST. So I am looking forward to watching Pewds play it. :3

PS: To view the vid, pause the music down below. There's no need to have both. :3