First half of the semester

Overall I have really enjoyed this class so far. I've started to notice my thought processes changing while in class. I'm starting to think differently and more deeply about things. The way we discuss the flow of time is the most interesting to me. That music video that we watched with one side going backwards and the other going forwards was probably the most interesting thing we've covered so far to me. It made my mind work very hard to figure out exactly what was going on. I also really liked the drawing activities where we drew without looking at our paper. It was a challenge to get away from my left brain thinking. This helped me a lot because I noticed that I am a lot more relaxed when using my right brain. I also noticed that it was much easier to draw while I was ignoring my left brain. I have always wondered how some people are so good at drawing and I was never good. I thought that it was just some people are automatically better than others but I feel like it really depends on the way you perceive things. If you can perceive things differently you will most likely draw them differently. For the most part I'm interested in anything that makes my brain work. I feel like a lot of schoolwork is just repetition and involves only a shallow understanding of things. In this class I've noticed that I actually have to think about things, and I really enjoy thinking about things.

Artists

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali is my favorite artist and I really love all of his work. The colors and style of the surrealist era is really interesting to me. I would like to know more about Dali because I don't know anything about him other than I appreciate his work.

Part of Dali's very well known piece

This is my favorite work of art

M.C. Escher

I'm interested in researching Escher because his illusions are very fascinating, I would love to see if there's anything behind them or if they are just simply illusions.

This is one of my favorites by Escher

This is a pretty cool illusion

Here is a well known piece by Escher

Obviously this isn't original but i thought it was pretty cool

Andy Warhol

I have done a little bit of research on Warhol previously and I discovered that he had a pretty interesting life, his art was also very edgy for its time which went along with his edgy personality.

Marilyn Monroe

Gun

10/5

During our last two classes we worked on a collage using magazine clippings and the drawings of the nude model that we did previously. I started by putting down a few of my drawings of the model then noticed the wavy lines of her body and started cutting out objects out of magazines to fill her body in. At this point I realized that I wanted to try to depict the role that technology plays into our everyday life. After all, our lives revolve around technology. I cut out the words "solid steel" and placed them on the body and also the words "pig skin" to show the woman being half mechanized and half biological. To me this is how most Americans are in this decade. I definitely found everyone's collages very interesting. In any future collages I make I plan on using a colored background like a few people did with theirs. I didn't really think to put down a background but I noticed that it added a lot when other people did. I also really liked the way Amy did the landscape in her's with different pieces of magazine clippings. I would also like to stray away from using a standard rectangular piece of paper in the future and do something like Ashok's collage with no white space at all.

I thought the discussion of time in the Scott McCloud reading was very interesting. I had never really thought about how comics can convey the progression of time. I always thought that one frame was just one instant in time but then i realized that usually multiple people are saying things at the same time so there is no way they can be all happening at the same time. I also thought it was amazing how the text is displayed actually affects the way you think about the image. When there is no text the comic looks like just an instant in time. When the text is in present tense it makes you think of it as a moving picture. When it is in past tense it makes it look like one instant again.

Questions:

1. When making your collages in class did you just start cutting and pasting or did you plan out your collage/the meaning of your collage before you started?

2. When you read comics do you read it as if the images are just instantaneous snapshots or do you feel like it is a moving picture?

I really couldn't think of anything at all to research about that had anything to do with our class but I found this interesting picture of a cat.

This relates to the Scott McCloud reading because it is similar to a frame of a comic. When my friend saw this picture he thought that the cat was just dancing but when I look at this picture I see a cat ice skating down the road. He sees it as one instant but I see it as a section of time.

Source:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheJYGRiAlOTwJ16kA7292SB7BLuxujA73m4TjBmKZbV__GrbZjp9gVkJgtG9GKmTYY5XdjC8PYJXUacZVocJ0s8CwP2_8UR_QbpAyt9lAtIa4rSXKq4imFW3k8KYVggBuiDKjrlgAk1fs/s400/the-dancing-tomcat.jpg