Day Nine: Project Runway Style

My still-life homework for Paul's class tomorrow

What a blissful sleep it was last night, after toiling over my "Camo" painting. Though hesitant to wake up, the loud beacon of my morning alarm felt no symathy and startled me out of bed to class. The morning session with Paul consisted of a series of nude figure drawings done in charcoal on newsprint. Inspiration was drawn from the works of George Seurat, who created pieces in which the contours of shapes were pushed to the far wings of the stage, and value and volume took the spotlight. To introduce the concept of value into our class, this assignment sharply contrasted the black on (almost) white paper drawings of last week, when the focus fell on the accuracy of the shapes, with little to no shading. We explored techniques such as toning the ground, in which the entire paper is shaded a light gray; after which, charcoal can be added and erased to create shadows and highlights. Personally, I don't like the process of toning the ground (at least on newsprint) because the quality of newsprint paper is not suited towards erasing, and I found that restoring the paper to its original value to be quite difficult. Paul continued to stress the importance of using the entire ground space, and not creating the "t-shirt effect" when composing. In order to create more interesting compositions, I need to work on my planning and spacing prior to setting charcoal to newsprint rather than blindly guessing.

The beginnings of our dress!

Frank's after-lunch class was an exciting time; it marked day one of our dress construction. Gabby, Sami lacked the materials we needed (wire, plastic, electric tape), so we ventured down 14th street to Artie's Hardware shop. Alas, we returned to Parsons with the realization that in order to work with wire, we would need wire cutters. Oh well. So we began building the bodice with strips of vinyl swatches that we found in the Green Supply Center. Though an arduous process to remove from Lola, our dress form, due to the gobs of hot glue that oozed out from between the strips of vinyl. We have approximately 5 more days to build this dress from start to finish. It's daunting.