This lunchtime lecture was different from all the other’s I had attended since it was a more informal discussion between a group of prior Maggie Walker students, instead of a speaker who had more of an intentional and directed message. I really appreciated the honesty in their answers; it didn’t feel like they were trying to convince us to all go to art school, which was what I kind of expected. I learned that VCU arts is a better program than I had originally thought, with lots of resources and studio space. People are at all kinds of different artistic levels when entering art school, so at VCU all first years take AFO, which introduces them to all kinds of different materials and art “foundations”. While some of the speakers said they benefited from this experience, others said they kind of felt like they were wasting their time learning basics they already knew and didn’t end up changing their mind about their major. Overall though, I feel like the program has good intentions and is a good idea.
I don’t plan on going to an art school at the moment, but I still had one really big takeaway from this lecture- you can harass your college for financial aid! I honestly didn’t know that was a thing because in my head right now colleges are all powerful institutions, but Lily May and Alex’s advice was to go to the financial office and just ask for more financial aid, and if they say no, go and ask again. In Alex’s experience, it's also how she was able to study abroad for a little bit which is something I definitely want to do. Overall, this lunchtime lecture was really informative, and I appreciated getting to hear about art school but also just about college life from real students.
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The piece is almost done! The tracing and filling in is my favorite part because it's so easy after all the layout has already been done. I wish I had done this project on a larger piece of paper because I feel like if there had been more space between the steps, it would be clearer that step 3 is one scene that stretches across the entire bottom of the page. The manual is based on Ikea manuals that have no words in order to make them easier to understand, and at the end I was debating about whether to include an Ikea logo on the piece, but then I decided against it because I don't want to draw attention from the real meaning of the piece and make it seem like commentary on Ikea the company itself. I don't love how the title is in Swedish and then there are still English words on the signs throughout the piece, but I couldn't think of a better way to communicate the "SOLD" or "NEW" since the words are completely different in Swedish. In hindsight, I think I should have just kept the title in English because while I thought it would force the viewer to look at it a second longer trying to figure out what it says, I think it just makes it unnecessarily confusing. In general though, I enjoyed the straightforward process of the piece and the clean final product. For my next piece, I want to do something kind of architectural and incorporate graph paper, because I really liked the process of drawing the houses and want to create something more elevated.
I learned how to use the laser printer to make stencils! It's surprisingly really easy; I just drew out the shapes I wanted and colored them in with a sharpie, and then you put them in the printer and it scans them. Then it uploads the scan onto the computer and you can re-position the image and highlight any negative space the scan missed, and then laser print it onto a piece of transparent paper. It all happens in the same place, the scanning and the printing! The stencils I made aren't super clean and smooth, so there are still some shaky edges that become apparent when outlining with sharpie, but they still helps me space things out evenly on the page so I'm glad I made them. Coach also said the printer could be used to burn into wood, which I think would be a super cool way to elevate pen and ink drawings, so I'm going to keep that in mind for future projects.
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Ria BakshiCheck out what I'm currently working on by clicking the PROCESS button! Archives
December 2020
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