Astaire

Spring is finally here. Yay!

This year's spring kinda slips unnoticeably... I had preoccupied myself for the past month or so, first with BA application interviews (done now) and then with spring term's submission (not quite ticked off). I have been trying to make my life hard for the past couple of weeks. It got to a point where a colleague of mine said this with a straight face: "Marsha, don't make your life difficult."

Well, don't I hassle myself a lot ^__^;

The good thing about hassling myself a lot, I find, is that I learn to tackle problems I've always thought as 'inherently unconquerable' or 'too difficult for my current skill level'. So far I've worked out how for the moment I can cut chiffons to a predetermined pattern shape: use spray mount on your piece of pattern paper and let dry, spread fabric, mark then cut (simple stuff.) Yet I still have my 'homeworks' to find out about... so I'm still on a learning curve.

Secondly, I have photographed some of the pages of work I did this term.


This is a series of quick (10mins) drawings done in visual study class. I can definitely do drawings that actually look like people and resemble people colour-wise, but... the session was about using more than three colours when the model is freckly pale and wore an all-black ensemble, as well as incorporating a piece of sticky tape (I tore mine into three.) In the end, I used six or seven colours.


This is part of SDS (self-development studies) for Visual Studies... I don't really favour working on A3 sheets since my existing sketchbook is a minuscule A5, which kinda explains why my portrait homework is so... small. Anyway. This image would reappear towards the end of this post.




I was bored waiting for my turn to be interviewed, so I got my sketchbook and fine pen out then started scribbling random bits and stuff. At first I wanted to do designs based on The Emperor's New Clothes (which I did)... and ended up drawing people's feet and bags. I got carried away in the Tube and in the bus. It's interesting how people shun themselves away from the camera but they are keen to peek over your shoulder when you hold a pen and a sketchbook.

Sometimes I come across people who want to learn how to draw, but they don't even try to draw. Trying to draw doesn't involve having prodigious artistic talents; drawing is as simple as making lines that do NOT constitute writing (in any writing system you're familiar with.) I know people who could barely draw anything at the start of their foundation year; they forced themselves to do these silly-looking lines (and agonised for a short period of time) and are now confident enough to draw from observation in public. As for myself, my first drawing was comparably much worse than that of my sister... so I took a fresh sheet of paper and re-did it again. The new sheet looked better than hers. Well, we just have to try and learn...


I honestly have no factional/political aspirations whatsoever, but I just found the images... amusing. So I put them together this way, along with bits of fabrics and hardware ^^; This A2 page is taken straight from my BA interview pile, and it originally consisted of two A3 pages stuck on a piece of A2 paper. I did about ten to twelve of these visual research pages... they're pretty enjoyable to do. Some turn out to be sweet and so delicate while others are rebellious and plain satirical. At the end I still use various elements from this page in the actual garment designs.

I'm trying to tick things off my list on this post... and what I haven't quite managed to do is to sew up three garments. And cook ayam goreng bumbu kuning during the spring break. Hee hee hee :))

My handsfree connector cable was recently split open. It's not so nice when you can't work along to a nice beat of music, but it's quite good to spend my time on the Tube to observe fellow travellers as well. It also makes me think that Sony Ericsson might really aspire to have its customers change their mobile handsets every two years, but I am NOT going to do *that* (if that's what they have in mind.) Anyway, after fasting quite a while on portable music, I found today's song echo the zeitgeist of spring.

Have a good day! ^__^