Last Day of School

Oppermann's little note on my Final Portfolio

Last day of class was freaking lovely. We all voted last week not to have to come to class at the usual 9 am (or 7am to catch 8am bus) so we met up at the campus gallery at 12 and there were donuts too. :3 Our final, besides submitting the portfolios was choosing maybe 5 pieces from said portfolio to be critiqued by both teacher and classmates. Surprisingly, a lot of us didn't pick for our 5 pieces works our teacher and classmates considered a whole lot better. As the note above said, some pieces I had chosen for her to ignore, she went and looked and preferred. 

Overall my critique that I got from the class was more or the less the same thing I've heard over the semester and midterm: I am lightning fast when it comes to locking down a gesture or pose (which she calls my talent), but oftentimes in my speed I already have like a pre-set model form in my head that in terms of capturing the human form, my drawings become generic or bland. I also have this tendency to stiffen up on longer poses because (again) I lock down on a pose fast, I spend the rest of time fussing so much about things that I overdo things. The biggest advice I got from her was to slow down, really look at my models carefully, pull back/ think carefully like where I should add another line or paint a shadow. Oh and also to take risks and mess up; if she never minded us having bad drawing, why should we? 

We finished up before the next school bus came so I wandered around the galleries checking out the Illustrations and Painting Thesis galleries (gorgeous stuff, as expected) and then for fun I bum watched this Architecture class whose finals were making these straw towers in what fashion, then were clamped to the wall and their points had to be able support weights dangling in a bucket. 

I think they pass if the towers don't break after maybe 5 pounds.

It was fun seeing the different structure designs and seeing what did or didn't work: some snapped or broke after a couple of weights, one tower snapped off his wooden base, and one fell apart from the 1st weight. The most interesting one was the one that, while the tower (the doodle to the back) collapsed on it's 'sections', it was still holding on to the bucket; even after 15 pounds! And when the teacher finally yanked the bucket out the whole thing magically went back to being a straight tower.