Guess what??

I got into the BFA program!! 

I'm excited to have that to come back to after my mission.

Life lately...

 Life has been great lately. I've been busy with lots of work and play. Life is about balance right? Gotta have both :) These are just some random things that have happened over the past month.

Kelsi and our somewhat matching pants on Pi day.

On St. Patrick's Day I spoke in church and we made green clover pancakes and delicious ebelskivers. 

Melissa told me that she found these cute little pies at Walmart, so Kelsi and I decided to try making our very own homemade pie shakes out of the baby pies. They were worth all of the trouble to make them. We would highly recommend a homemade pecan pie shake ;)

Our ward had a ward clue party that was pretty awesome. I had to go late after going to a friend's bridal shower, so I didn't dress up, but everyone else went all out especially our Bishop and his wife. It was way fun!

New Genre: Installation

For my latest New Genre project I decided to do another installation piece. I was inspired by Andy Goldsworthy and his site-specific nature installations. 

I went to a park close to where I live and I found this tree that is huge, awesome and had a lot of pine cones that had fallen on the ground underneath it and then I just started going for it. It started out as just a formal, aesthetic piece similar to my first installation with all of the prints, but after I created it I realized that there was a lot of personal meaning in it as well. The title is Passing Through and it came to be a representation of noticing the world around us and a type of journey that we all pass through.

Bountiful

This weekend the roommates and I went up to Bountiful to spend Friday night at Kelsi's house. We were welcomed by her wonderful family with delicious fajitas that kels' mom had made us. We then went to Nielsen's Frozen Custard for dessert. It was delicious! I hadn't been to Nielsen's in a long time and a cookie dough chocolate custard concrete was overdue. 

We obviously loved it.

After a great food, company and conversation at Nielsen's we went back to kels' house to get ready for our sleepover. We got in our pj's and put in the movie Music and Lyrics for us to fall asleep to. It was great. I always have a blast with these ladies. 

We spent almost all of Saturday lounging around, eating yummy breakfast, painting our nails and watching movies. It was just what the doctor ordered. We all loved having the time to spend together and to just relax from our busy schedules. Kelsi's family is also so fun to talk to and they were so kind to host us for the weekend. It just felt so good to be in a home and to get away from Provo. 

At around 4 we got ready for the day and headed to India Palace, where Kelsi worked over the summers, to get some good authentic Indian food. (Kels is 1/4 Indian btw, even though you might not ever guess it from looking at her. Her grandpa is from India and he came to study at BYU, joined the church and married a girl from Denmark). The food was delicious and the workers were so kind to us. They all love Kelsi. 

This mango drink is to die for! It is soooo good!

delicious little desserts.

I seriously cannot express how much I love these girls and how grateful I am to have them in my life. I don't think it was any coincidence that we all moved in together this year. It was so fun to get away for a quick weekend trip, eat good food, relax and spend time together. I can't believe that we're already half way through this semester. Time really does fly when you're having fun!

New Genre: Sound

For my New Genre class we had to create an art project that was mainly based on sound. This is what I came up with. Just as fare warning, to appreciate it you will definitely have to keep an open mind. The title of the art piece is Don't Cry Over Spilled Milk (Listening to The Way it is).

My inspiration for the piece was my dad and how we would always listen to the song The Way it is by Bruce Hornsby on long road trips to Utah and my dad would never let us blow bubbles in our milk when we were kids. It's kind of a funny tribute to those two strong memories that I have from my childhood. I put headphones in and am listening to that song while I try to blow bubbles in my milk to it. I think it turned out pretty cool. 

Hope you enjoy :)

New Genre: Installation

 I'm in a New Genre class this semester and it is an awesome class! We deal with "new" types of artwork like installation, sound, performance and video. My first project was an installation project that I decided to use printmaking in. I created 9 different aquatinted intaglio plates that I printed around 35 prints from. This is what my hand looked like about halfway through the printing process...ink everywhere. I love it though :)

Here are what the 9 different prints look like. They are all very simplistic and abstracted representations of things that we see everyday. For example, the mountains, tree bark, sidewalk, the blinds, an iphone, and the moon.

Then I strung all of the prints on white string and hung them from the ceiling to create a space that the viewer could walk through to see all of the prints. I wanted to create an aesthetically pleasing installation that was about the process and time it took to create it. 

It took a lot of time and work but I really enjoyed doing it. Printmaking is so fun! I love it!

Figure Drawing

I'm in a figure drawing class this semester and I've really been enjoying it. I've never taken a figure drawing class before, or really ever drawn the figure in an observational way, so it has definitely taken some getting used to and lots of practice. It's cool to see the improvement, though. At the beginning of the semester we started off with very quick gestural drawings, ranging from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Here's an example of a quick 2 minute gesture drawing:

We then moved on to longer drawings and some subtractive drawing as well to get different values and shading. Here are examples of some 10 minute drawings:

Last week we did our first large-scale drawings and they took the full 3 hours of class. It's crazy how time goes by so quickly in the class. We draw for 20 minutes then take a break so the model can move around a bit and then we get back to drawing again. These are 22x30 inch drawings.

It's cool to see how much I've improved from the beginning and how I am much better at figuring out proportions just after some practice. This is my last drawing that I did. I think it turned out pretty well.

Sculpture

I was excited to finish all of my sculpture projects from Fall semester. The class seemed to fly by so that I felt like I did all of the projects in the time span of about a week. It got a little crazy but I'm pretty happy with the outcomes and I feel more confident in all of the art forms.

So this is what my stone looked like at the beginning. It was rough and big, weighing about 35 pounds. During and outside of class I would go and sit and chisel away at my stone while listening to pandora. It was pretty cool. I am even more impressed now with awesome marble sculptures by Michelangelo because let me tell you...it ain't easy.

safety first!

Here's how it turned out after it had been sanded, smoothed and polished. I wish I had had a little more time to work on it because I feel like it might not be completely finished, but thus is the life of a busy student. It looks different at all different angles, which is kind of cool.

The stone itself had some really pretty colors in it.

This is how my steel project turned out. Not going to lie, I was really nervous for this one because the requirements were welding and forging. If you're not familiar with either method, I'll just say that they both involve extremely hot temperatures and danger...especially welding. Once I got going with the welder though it wasn't too bad. I'm really happy how it turned out! It looks totally different from all angles, which is awesome. I was influenced by some of my work I had done for my printmaking class and I wanted to try to use some of the ideas I was using before and creating it in 3-D. 

I LOVE how my bronze turned out. It is such an interesting process to cast a bronze as well. I loved learning about the process and getting to actually do it. 

First of all, I made a wax figure of the object that I wanted to be cast. Then I attached it to multiple sprews of wax to a cup covered in wax. Then we dipped it in a slurry and sand 9 times with 6 hours in between each dipping. After that, we put them in a kiln that melted away all of the wax and poured 2,000 degree liquid bronze into the casts to fill in where the wax was. After cooling for a day, we chipped off the cast and there was the bronze statue. We had to cut and grind off the sprews and then I put a liver of sulfur patina on it to give it the rich dark brown color. 

Now Max has been immortalized. Pretty cool.

Ceramics

I finally took pictures of all of my ceramic pieces that I made this past semester. I had ceramics for the first block so it was from the beginning of September until mid October. 

The first day of class we made spoons out of porcelain. They were fired at a cone 10, which means that they are food safe so I could actually use them. They aren't super practical though, I was going for more aesthetics and a progression from a simple baby spoon to a ladle.

Man Made Project: We had to recreate an object that was man made. I decided to try to make something that I love to make and have made in real life out of clay to see how the process would be different. I made a pie. 

I made each individual apple and connected them and laced the crust on top.

It even opens up so I can put things inside. Unfortunately it is not food safe, but it'll be cool to just have around.

Organic Project: We had to make a sculpture that felt organic, so this is how mine turned out.

I sprayed the glaze on with an airbrush, which was a cool new technique to learn.

Basic Shapes Project: I had to create a bunch of hollow pillow and tube shapes and then connect them in an aesthetically pleasing way. I like how it turned out looking like bones.

Final Project: I had to incorporate things I had done before and things that I liked from other people's sculptures. I like the delicate folds from another girl's sculpture so I used that idea and I carved deep into them to give it texture. It has lots of pretty detail when you see it up close. 

This class proved to me yet again how much I love ceramics.