Milk Chocolate is . . . Meh

Yeah, so, yesterday I bought a bar of Swiss milk chocolate with hazelnuts in. It was the third time in as many weeks that I have eaten milk chocolate and thought I shouldn't have bothered. I mean it was all right, but it just wasn't as fantastic as chocolate is supposed to be. Maybe I just bought cheap, crappy chocolate. Or maybe I need to just get dark chocolate, which has never disappointed me. Now if only I could find some dark chocolate with hazelnuts in. It's easy to find dark chocolate with almonds. Even Hershey's makes reasonable dark chocolate with almonds (and Hershey's dark chocolate used to be grainy and horrible). But no one seems to make dark chocolate with hazelnuts. Or hedgehogs. Has anyone ever seen dark chocolate hedgehogs? Mmm . . .

Airship Coat

Oh, won't someone get this for me for xmas . . . Warm wool coat (did I mention the weather has turned very chilly here), airship insignia. Airship insignia!! Anyway. I could use a coat. (I should probably measure myself and see if it would fit. I think it will. But I should measure.)

Relief!

Relief printmaking, that is. I'd set aside the entire day of today to work on nothing but relief printmaking. I wanted to get a big linocut either done or well on its way. Alas, it's not even begun.

My idea was to do a sort of scroll-shaped (that is, long and narrow) image from Aesop's The Fox and the Grapes. But I just can't get the fox right in my sketches. So I've set that aside for now, to work on drawings for a woodcut (on plywood!). Here's a sketch I did sometime last year when my design class started to get really boring:



I rather like this character. I'm not entirely sure who she is or where she fits into my various stories, but I do know she's a test pilot and a courier for Frisland Airships. Anyway, I thought it would be kind of fun to try to do a black and white woodcut of her, so I did this sketch of her face, thinking I could surround it with a black oval, a la Victorian portraits:



Then I traced the image onto another sheet of paper, so I could fix a few things, like the goggles and gloved hand. I traced over the main lines with a sharpie so I could get a clearer idea of what I was doing. For some reason I decided to try to make it into a greyscale marker drawing, with rather dubious results:



Heh. Now try to picture what this will look like in high contrast black and white, without a whole lot (or any) fine detail, as a woodcut. Anyway, we'll see how it turns out . . .

Time, I Need Time

Actually, I'm pretty sure Imperius said "Thyme. I need thyme," but anyway . . .

I think I may have taken on too much this semester. Scroll down to that post where I detailed my schedule. See anything wrong with it? Add in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday working 9-12:30 in the slide library. Now do you see? How about there's hardy any smegging time to do the bazillion assignments that come with fifteen credits of art school, twelve credits of which are studio courses? Oh yeah, and then there's my writing job, the one that actually pays the bills (which, alas, pays in US dollars which were worth less than Canadian dollars when I put my cheque in the bank earlier today!) But anyway. Somehow I thought I could do all this.

Sigh. I have asked to cut back on my slide library hours, so as of this past week, remove the Wednesday morning shift from the schedule. It's more manageable. Especially since my photo teacher said that any assignments except the final project can be resubmitted at any time up to the penultimate class. That's a huge relief, because my first two assignments were utter crap. And no, that's not just my perfectionist self speaking. Anyway. I feel I can breathe a little now, though I am still thinking of asking for another free morning. Especially since I looked at my courses to date and realized that if I do an Interdisciplinary degree (which fits better with my current plans of action A, B and C--which is to say, all of them) I can graduate a bit sooner. Even if I take on a much lighter course load next semester.

So immediate plans are to make it through this semester working as hard as I can (and nine of my fifteen credits are litho and relief printing, which are more fun), then relax a bit school-wise. But first, survive the semester. And I thought last winter was hellish!