Welcome to Second Semster

Hi everyone - sorry I have been ignoring the blog for the past month. however I was on break and having to much fun being home. Some highlights of break include, Christmas (of course) hanging out all day with my cousin at SAM (Seattle art Museum) having a nice chat over some wonderful chi with pastor Abby, Will, and Libby. Then there was  Megen amazing new years eve party, spending days at the udub and shoreline community college pretending to be a normal college student. Spending my last evening in Seattle with my best friends, was a amazing way to end my break. there was of course a lot more to break and I enjoyed it all. but now I'm back to school and getting in the grove of classes.

There were no classes on Monday as it was MLK day. so we are starting on Tuesday, I only have two classes on Tuesday and Thursday. I have already posted my schuagle but i will post it a second time as I have forgotten most of it. Make note this will probly not be my final schuagle, more on that later. 

My first class of second semester is my Color Class, I have herd lots about this class as the two teachers who teach it have very different methods of teaching it, one teacher in a more classes style with color wheels and such the outer is a bit more new wave and goes more with instincts of students and such. I don't really know witch one i have, but both share the philosophy of lots of work. the teacher has already e-mailed us with vocab words and some basic supplys we need to have the first day of class.

My second class of the Day is Glass, a fun class for sure. Unfortunately I think I will have to drop it as I want to take into to Interactive design (an all day Friday class) as I am looking into this as a second possible major. Never fear as i will take glass some outer time as it looks SO cool.

You may notice that i am not taking a jewelry class this semester. Since I have taken jewelry one and am a jewelry student I can use the studio. On the agenda for jewelry to make this semester include a few late Christmas presents for friends and a pair of cuff links and matching studs for my dad.

hopefully I will write a second post soon perhaps tomarrow night as a review of all my classes.

Ring Review

I'm done with the ring!!! here it is

sorry its sideways, I am very happy with the end product and I'm looking forward crit on Thursday now. I have got tons of complements on it just in the studio, witch makes me feel like all the work I put in was worth it. :)

before it was done thought It went though some funny phase including the moon phase...

pin cushion phase...

and small spike phase...I am so happy its done! I feel like my finals might go Okay now! before I can relax and go home I have to make it through a presentation in Drawing, turning in my essay in English, and my Final in Art History, then the final crit on Thursday and then my final class for 4D all day Friday, where I have to present what I have learned about Progressing.

Then I get to spend my Saturday in SF and then jump on a plane back to Seattle!

I am looking forward to a nice break and a wonderful Christmas!

FINALS, FINALS, FINALS

down with week one and now on to week two. Finals here are two weeks long, a exhausted two week slog. this weekend i am trying to get as much done as possible, so this will be really short. photos will fallow soon when everything is done

so excited to come home

I'm going back to my homework i have a essay to Finnish today plus a drawing to color render and work on my 4D code program that I really have to work on.

-Katie

Key Vs. Keycards

I have both. I like my key better. In my dorm we have a key card to get into the dorm and then a key to get into my room. the problem with key cards is they are faulty. I'm on my second key card, the one they gave me the micro chip was able to almost completely pop out of the frame. now it appears that about half of everyone is having getting the door open to the dorm it just flashes a yellow light at me, then I am reduced to banging on the door until someone lets me.

my key has never failed to work, I lost it once, but it never did not open my door. I want to stick to my keys.

restering for new classes, thanksgiving, and FINALS!

Hi everyone, Sooo I have locked myself out of my dorm so I'm waiting in the liberty untill my roommate comes back typing this on a really nice Mac computer.

Lots to talk about in this blog I will cover my quiet thanksgiving, all my final projects in all my classes and of corse my schedule for next semester

Signing up for classes here and every body else in the college world we sign up online and they stager the times and priority levle of everyone. upperclassman down, so I one of the last people to sign up cuz' i'm a freshman and I transfered in no credits. classes fill up fast so i had made two schedules in case some of my classes had filled up. no matter what i have to take the last two core art classes and Into to modern art, plus ethics that leaves one class free as an elective.  My first choice for that was intro to Interaction - however when I went to sign up it was full so I signed up for my second choice Glass blowing. so as it stands this is my schedule however things are likely to change.

So I have five classes. Into to Modern art, Into to ethics, color correlations, hand productions, and into to glass and glass blowing (for now)

I had a quiet thanksgiving I stayed here and ate a bunch of pumpkin pie! classes started dwindling as people went home starting on that monday up untill Wednesday when all but my morning class was canceled. I got to Skype with my family which was nice and got frustrated at my computer untill I gave up and read my book. I was planing to get so much done but I blew it all off and read all day for the next two days. I re-read and finished four books plus the last book of the Eragon Inheritance novel which I had started on audio book about a week before the book that stands out is Shatter me by Tahereh Mafi it reminded me of the hunger games but the main character was a bit darker and the book had a faster plot. also I hate the cover, completely the wrong feel for the book. Ugg :(

that brings us to Finals. In this three weeks between thanksgiving are finals week. Our finals are not like lots of outer finals cuz' almost all of them are projects one is a paper and i have one test in Art History. everything else is projects we have started them now i am doing a drawing of an interior shot of a room fully color rendered. I'm starting to learn code I will use Processing hopefully I will make some kind of interactive jewelry for 4D (need to spend a bit more time on this) and a ring which is the major half of the final in jewelry (there's also a small secondary project  too but we have not gotten there yet)

this ring is going to be cool. one) its going to be huge, like one of thoughts huge cocktail rings Two) I'm going off the last project I did with the dots - my inspiration for that was a photo of different sized pearls on a wood block so this time I am using real pearls and I am setting a stone (small turquoise) Three) learning way cool stuff to make this possible.

I have not got super far as all the beginning steps are a bit tedious but once i get past them things will sped up. The base ring composes two silver disks that I cut out I'm doming them using a Dappling block to form two half circles In these photos you can it the dome about half way through the shaping process. After they were fully domed I had to figure out where all the pearls and stone was going to go after that was all laid out. We filled the top dome with Pitch. This nasty looking stuff that we melt with a head gun its made up of Plaster and tree resin so whall it looks really gross it does not smell bad. We set the now full dome in a big block of that stuff, then cooled. this allows me to put little divots in the dome allowing the pearls to sit better. having it in the pitch when I do this will help keep the round dome shape I've already made.  This is the dome just set in the pitch you can see all my sharpy marks, this is before any dimpling.

I don't have a shot of just the dimpling but this is a rough idea of what it will look like!

MEGA POST with bad dormroom made movies

Hi everyone - so i have hear that there are a few of you i had no idea that so many people read my blog but my stats back me up so that's cool. I really enjoy keeping it, so thank you for reading. OK so on to what you come here to read...

Friday kicked off my exciting weekend I got up at 7:00 to get on the 7:20 free shuttle to the san fransciso campus. let me take a moment to explain a bit about this dule campus thing.

Like so many city schools nothing is confined to a campus, in Oakland a good example of this would be the freshman studio's witch are down the street and the health and wellness center is across the street and behind a curry restrount. so with all that why not hop across to the much more trendy San Fransisco. CCA has three large building in SF (and a upperclassman dorm) and lets face it its what they show off on the website and in all the brochures. Witch i get, SF has a way better reputation then Oakland, however the building are in a very industrial part of SF and Oakland is a neighborhood I feel a bit more comfortable in.  for convenience and because there is not a close Bart station to CCA SF they run a shuttle many times a day but not on weekends and it gets cut back on Friday. The main building is really nice it used to be a grey hound bus station that they have redone quite nice. this building houses all the more modern art major (except for animation) is here like Fashion, and ID. I'm not here much as I am in a classical major. they have a admin. building around the corner and then a grad and senior studio building across the street from this building. one thing to note it this campus is dresser, in Oakland people commonly come to class in PJ's in SF Heels are the norm.

why had I woken up so early and dragged myself on a shuttle at 7:20 on a Friday was for my 4D class, one of my farovet classes this semester most of the people in this class are transure students and they live in SF so the professor made a SF day we reviewed the films we had made  during the past three weeks in one of the computer labs. I am going to post the video's but let me state first that I don't like video cameras I never got use to them so it was a hard project for me. the first is a four minuet day of your life. and the second is the same but you change it somehow to show something else. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/31628041]

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/31938444]

OK now that that's over I hope to never have to pick up a video camera until some major life event happens.

we reviewed everyone's Video's  then hoped a bus and headed to SF MOMA and walked through the whole thing the exhibit we were really there to see was called Less and more the design ethos of Dieter Rams. It was a great exhibit and weird. Dieter Rams was the chef designer of Braun. Here's his Wikipedia page  I would encourage you to read or at least skim it. The exhibit was weird because all these things because all these common if old things were behind glass in a bright room you wanted to pick it up and turn it on and of corce you could not.

After the museum we walked to a movie theater and when to Melancholia, I'm not going to give a full review but it was weird. I liked it the class seemed to be in a split of people who liked it and people found it too weird, or just boring. after a trip back on the Bart I was back to my dorm room.

On yesterday I got up and with a friend, hoped back on the Bart and back to SF this time to the Asian art museum. we got lost found it and spend a good time inside going thought the gallery's we were there for a art history project. It was a cool museum, I will try to get back soon.

my sunday was nice and quiet just the way I like it. coffee in the morning, and then Homework, I did my drawing homework, witch turned out i did half wrong. but my drawing teacher being very nice told me that I had made lots of progress since Wednesday lesson, since I have manged to draw nothing on Wednesday, it was!

Tomorrow I have a cit on my brooch, Witch i finished finally!  Here it is i think it turned out well, I find it kind of creepy really.

I also bought five stones from the stone sales man walking away with only spending $55 witch was way less then what I thought. I'm also quite happy with what I got one or two of these will end up on my next project witch is a ring.

  anyway see you later when something else exciting happens - Katie

Update

Hi all it's been a bit since my last post.  In truth not much has happened, we are in that quite period of the semester before everything gears up for finals at the start of  December. I got a few new photos of my roommate and I on Halloween. I don't really know what she is but its really cool looking. Here's a photo of one of my sweetmate's in her costume.

Ok lets move on to the occupy Oakland movement. I have not been in any of the riots, although people in my dorm have been down there.  the walk out/strike gained momentum during the day last week on the fourth.  there were only three people out of my morning drawing class, but my English (already a bad class so why show up anyway) was down to six people not counting the teacher. My art history class was just over half the people there, witch was kind of nice because it allowed for a very layer back lesson and on a few peoples suggestions, we got to see the start of the movie, The secret of the Kells, because we were just getting to the book of Kells. Here's the movie preview, it tells a loose tail of the book and how it was able to server the viking. I encourage everyone to see the movie its really good and is approachable for just about all ages, the animation style kind of mimics that of the book. anyway check it out.  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMPhHTtKZ8Q]

On the classes front

they are ticking along nicely. In drawing we have moved from Characters drawings to exploding view drawings, the class is cattored to the Industrial design (I.D.) and the Design majors (Interior, Architecture, and so forth) so we will be spending some time on this, witch is fine it is interesting. the example drawing is one the teacher did during his first few years at art school (He's in I.D) you can just see the edge of some of the character drawings. we each had to bring in a small thing to draw i chose a battery powered pencil sharpener.  we had to take them appart and over the next two weeks will be drawing them here's a photo of all the parts of the pencil sharpener. In jewelry we are working hard on our sotering projects i am making a brooch its near completion and I will post a photo later. on Thursday we are having a stone salesman coming witch is exciting because that means that we will be starting our project on setting a bezel something i have always wanted to learn.

Until next time.

Katie

Welcome to november

Its November first. the month with that weird Holiday called Thanksgiving and thoughts few weeks between Midterms and Finals.  

Halloween is lingering in the large amount of candy wrappers. turns out that Halloween is kind of the school sprite day here, its kind of like the homecoming game, there's even a dace (oh joy) everyone has a costume, everyone goes out and does stuff and just about everyone wears a costume. there were not some many people in the freshman classes wearing a costume cuz' we had no idea how big this would be. also i should mention that, being a art school its sometimes hard to tell the difference from a costume and something that someone would just wear on a normal day...

I went as Sherlock homes (or just some random detective) that I reused from last year. the most memorial costume I saw was this guy who went as capt. Jack Spiro it was really good, I mean how many hours do you think he put into that! it was the whole outfit too, down to the shoes.

the outer good thing about Halloween was that the Jewelry and medal department's (or JAM) had their bridge event. Every Department in the school hold a event at some point in the year for whoever wants to show up so you can get to know the department (or free food). They decided to do a mini golf coarse I have been hearing about this for over a month. they built everything, I mean everything besides the golf balls. the studio manager built the platforms and the cool features on each hole and the teachers made the putters. Sorry all the photos are bad but i took them on my phone and I couldn't see the screen in the sunlight.   This is the first hole, It fits around a existing tree and the kiln lit up when it got dark.

here's hole two you cant really see in this photo but the medal thing is a ring with a diamond on top (witch lit up!) in the form of a loop-d-loop.

Here's the last hole and the hardest. the anvil has a hole on it that (if you can) drops the ball down onto level three where the real hole is, complicating this was a fake hammer that moved to hit the anvil. To my knowledge, only one person got a hole in one on this one - and even he admits it was luck :)

here is my teachers putter that she made for this, and turned out really well, its based on the flamingo putters from Alice and wonderland.

The other exciting thing that is happening this week  is the occupy Oakland/strike/shut down the one percent/walk out thing. I want to say now that on principle I support what seems to be the overall goal of the occupy protests, but I can not get behind this. CCA is a priviet art school we reserve no money from the government and we are ALL paying a lot to be here, so how is it sticking it to the man or whatever to get behind in my classes and piss off my teachers? also how is damaging local business by not going shopping tomorrow helping anyone eather. So no i will not sleep in tomorrow and i will go to my classes and yes I might even go and get my normal cup of coffee in the morning, and i will feel fine about it.

Its been a while...

So its been a while since I have really blogged however not to many important or exciting things have happened.

after I missed my first California earthquake I got to go through two smaller earthquakes, really they were more like aftershocks and very small it felt more like someone had dropped something really heavy. we got evacuated both times for these earthquakes. the second evacuation happened near midnight on Thursday. Standing out in the cold was not as much fun as you would hope.  oh well.

over the weekend, homework was done, room was cleaned, food was bought.

Monday was exciting all my normal classes happened, I had a midterm in History which went fine, in drawing it was announced that we will be moving into using color, there was much rejoicing in the class, as we have been only using black and wight. I'm not sure how I feel about this but the teacher has taught me so much I'm going to set my skepticism aside. the most exciting thing on Monday tho was the guest speaker from the Jewelry department. His name is David H. Clemons he's a very interesting artistic and has lead a interesting life. here is there web sight http://davidclemons.com/home.html he does lots of mixed media stuff and you can see that is his back ground. He originally when to study per-med however you can tell that did not stick but you can see that in his art and of course his race (he's African American)  has influenced him greatly. I think my favrout piece by him is his remembrance rosary. you can check it out on his website. witch has been linked to above.

In jewelry i finished my Silver band ring i really liked the way it turned out, and I really liked the process. here's some shots of the ring

I also have a old piece to post, as it was a gift when I made it. I thought it was cute so I'm going to put it in, even thought it was something i did in my spare time, so its not ground breaking

Sorry its a little blurry :)

Erthquake?

there was about 2 hours ago a 3.9 earthquake in SF that you could feel in Oakland. I Missed It. How do you miss a earthquake? i have no idea but i did - i tracked back and at the time i was at the gym and was on the wall, so what i did not notice the wall moving? maybe the earthquake wasent felt there? maybe the building has great ground support? well whatever, I missed my first California earthquake.