The Glove

I’d not posted anything about art so I figured I’d have a change of pace here. Now, I’d been drawing ever since I realized the back pages of my math notebooks make for great doodle areas (hereby explaining why I suck so much at the subject) and there’s this constant little problem I have where  a lot of smudges on the edge of my hand. Any artist who’s worked with graphite, charcoal, or pastels would probably be familiar with this little problem, seeing as the human hand secretes small amounts of oil (the same stuff CSI uses to get fingerprints) and or sweat any time you draw. Any fluid+any dry media usually means smudging.

I figure I’d eventually develop a drawing style where my hand never touches the paper.

Until I saw this video:

Caramoan Adventure – Climbing to the Grotto

For those I haven’t told yet, I spent most of the weekend over in Caramoan, Camarines Sur. It was my sister Jeannie’s idea really, coming out of a quick conversation on Skype back in December. There were 11 of us there, mostly Jeannie’s friends and the bf. If the name Caramoan sounds familiar to you, it’s prolly because you managed to follow a popular reality show at least in the last few months.

Open Letter to Smart Bro aka Smart Bro’s Moment of Epic Fail

Hi Smart Bro,

I’m not even sure this will even get to you, but I’ll try all the same. My family’s been subscribing to your broadband service since 2006. The first few years were great, fast, if not obscenely fast connections, no data caps (that I know of), no supplementary programs to install other than the ones built into the OS (and in our house, that’s Win7 and WinVista).

But all of that changed, when the Fire Nation attacked.

And me without an army of equalists.

On 13 February I’d been invited to a small bazaar called “Made with Love” by Yani, another blogger over at the LRI Design Plaza over in Bel-Air, Makati. It was a Valentine-themed event that pretty much features a lot of hand crafted stuff made by enterprising arts and crafts people, most of whom seem to be regulars in the bazaar scene.

Overdose of estrogen aside, a lot of nice stuff in the event. Sadly, as I’d forgotten to bring my bitchin’ camera, I’d had to make do with the 2MP camera from my Samsung dumbphone.

Art Class First Output

Ok, so after 4 sessions I managed to finally make something I can post. The techniques the instructor was giving me weren’t really the traditional charcoal pencil/stick on paper. It’s charcoal dust on brushes. Basically the technique holds that you can have a lot more control on your art with basic graphite outlines and a lot of charcoal dust applied through layers and layers of black.

Art Classes: To Sign up or Not to Sign Up?

I guess an update is in order. In a previous post I mentioned being interested in furthering my art education, so I went around trying to find places that offer an art class.

It was around Christmas day that I found a small art gallery near a tea shop in Festival Mall. They had flyers on a few art classes a lot of people seem to like going to. There’s even a judge there who’s like 2x my age, the gallery guy said.

I thought to myself, ok, not bad. Eight sessions under 10K pesos. This could work. I could probably go for pastels, then oil painting, and get some experience in with media I never seriously worked with.

Then I realized I might need more options than one gallery. I had a friend who has contacts with the Artists Association of the Philippines, which is based in Manila. It’s a bit of a commute, but the guys over there have ways to sell whatever artwork you make, minus their commission. Okay, so that’s option 2. Either I go for the easy commute, but likely big budget classes or we go for a longer commute but possibly get more exposure.

So I let the holidays go, thinking I could just go and decide once and for all when New Years is over.  I actually stopped by the mall again for an unrelated reason (needed to get some new batteries for a pair of wristwatches I had lying around I never really use) when I found this little kiosk close to the Francis Magalona store.

Lo and behold, what amounts to 4 months (weekends only) of classes, just under 5K.

Needless to say I’m signing up next weekend.(“,)

Bucket List

With the end of 2012 mere hours away I figure I should take into account some of the things I’d eventually like to accomplish by the end of 2013. It’s probably going to end up more like a guideline of sorts, but I will be checking back on this list every now and then at different parts of the year.

Hopefully this won’t be as big a waste of time as the last one.