Tuesday:
Taking pictures of animals is hard. They don't want to cooperate and stay still :( probably and especially when there's a nest involved. It took me forever to get these pictures of the sparrows. And even so I'm not completely satisfied with them. (Is it just me or do sparrows look REALLY toylike and fake?)

Wednesday:
The fun thing about Oklahoma is that there are fields pretty much everywhere. Okay, slight exaggeration, but still fields are pretty easy to find. Anyway, the power lines caught my attention as I was driving and I had to loop around a couple times to find a ditch of sorts so I could park my car and wander to get these shots. (It's amazing how curious people become when you're walking around with a camera)

 Thursday:
In my quest for letters I was driving around with my camera in my passenger seat. As I drove by the water tower I thought it'd be cool to get a shot. (Note to self, it looks really suspicious when you're stopped at a traffic light and pull out a camera with a telephoto lens--again weird/confused looks ensue)

Friday:
Instead of the actual sunset I decided to tried to capture a different point of view. ( I like trees. They don't move or squawk at you or leave)

shooting ducks/geese

A friend of mine told me that there were babies at the duck pond. WHO CAN RESIST BABY ANYTHING?! So armed with my telephoto lens I went on a shooting spree. I think it was nap time at the duck pond when I went because there were quite a few geese sleeping--btw geese eyelids are creepy. I don't know why, but it just looks... weird... I didn't include the photos that weirded me out but if you need evidence the whole wild goose chase is on my laptop :P

this week

Monday:
the squirrel sketches that I took from the video. there's a part where he just rubs himself against the ground and it's super cute--but when drawn out it doesn't translate as well.

Tuesday:
The day after I did the sketches a friend of mine posted a cute picture of a squirrel asleep on an angel statue. so I went ahead and doodled that



Wednesday:
I was at my parents' house with my camera so I walked around with my camera taking pictures. this one was my favorite.



Thursday:
I have technical difficulties drawing/doodling/sketching cats. THIS IS SOMETHING I NEED TO OVERCOME at some point. Anyway this was from a little video I took of my cat eating cat treats. yeah, it failed, but oh well.


Friday:
I think I need to start a project where I photograph sunsets every night and just accumulate a years worth.... maybe some year when I don't work 10 hour shifts (not happening for a while)

Due to my work schedule, the storm, and the lack of internet at my parents' house. this is a little late.

Tuesday:
I love vines and ivy. I'm not really sure what exactly this is but it covers one side of the art building and apparently has flowers too. These two were my favorites out of the ones that I shot.  I like how the flowers give a focus to the greenery and contrast the sky. The bottom one I liked because those aren't flowers, they're actually chunks of paint that detached from the wall that almost mimic the flowers.

Wednesday:

I took a little bit of time to explore a book about the birds of North America. This is a sketch I did from it

Thursday:
I enjoy making amigurumi when I have free time. This is a little fox that I crocheted and put together

Friday:
This is a little lizard made from seed beads. While waiting out the storm I found a bag of seed beads and randomly flashed back to elementary school when making little bead animals were "popular"

so I spent a small portion of my lunch break chasing a squirrel around campus. It amuses me that they're not afraid of people. They won't let you get too close, but they just kind of accept that we're there. Anyway, this was my favorite photo that I took. I also captured a little bit of video so I'll probably take that and do some sketches like I did for the petco mouse/rat

rest of the week

Wednesday:

I found one of those mosquito-eater things outside my door so I took the opportunity to take a few photos.

Thursday:

this was a sketch that I did while I was brain storming for ideas I think it took 15-20 minutes? give or take ... some time (yeah I really wasn't paying that much attention to time, but I feel like I didn't work on it that long)

Friday:

Once again I was in LOVE with the cloud formations. These were a few of my favorite.

photos

Monday:

I had this but I just forgot to post it. I followed my friends around the Medfair. This is a picture of Maria playing with a snake at the petting zoo. it has a nice depth of field focusing on her and the snake and blurring out the background

Tuesday.

I was feeling pretty crummy and sick today so I took the day off to recuperate. Towards the end of the day, I started feeling less woozy so I ventured out to the ceramics building to decorate my piece incase we do have the pit fire tomorrow. While there I took a panoramic picture of the sunset and view because it was really nice once the clouds cleared out.

Opening an alpine kiln...

it's always exciting when there's an alpine kiln being unloaded! it's like Christmas... only with ceramics! I took a chance and loaded all my pieces on the same shelf in the kiln, so they would either turn out awesome.. or not so much... AND THEY WERE AWESOME~!!! I had around 5 pieces with this combination of glazes and various effects. I only took pictures of the baby bowl it's the size of two hands cupped together.

spirograph

I had an awesome opportunity to take an up-close picture of a scissor-tailed-fly catcher.... and then my friend scared it off >_<

Anyway. I remember playing with this, a spirograph, as a kid. They used to have them as party favors and I guess just more available. It was really hard to find and get a hold of one. And unfortunately it doesn't have as many options to increase contrast... but this was a trail run just to get used to using the  small circles and constraints. I'll explore it more at some point

Ceramics

After a weird result in beginning ceramics I'd avoided the shino glaze for the rest of that semester as well as the one after. However for some reason as a pet side project I became interested in it and wanted to explore the glaze family.

This shino is named after one of the founding fathers of shino,

his name escapes me at the moment, but there's a lot of speckles

that were cause from the clay body as well as additional iron

sprinkles.

It's interesting because the areas where the glaze was thicker, 

are slightly (a few millimeters) thicker by feel as well as whiter

in appearance.

This is the shino available at OU. The dark areas/gray areas are
where carbon was trapped within the glaze, the orange was where
the glaze was thinner as well as protected by wax. On the left,
you can faintly see some texture--that is created by the glaze
separating or "crawling."  I think Shino is the only glaze at OU
that does that.

There is also White Shino! So instead of orange the parts that
were protected from the carbon trapping and "dirty" firing
are white instead of orange.

The following two pictures show the same bowl from different angles. This was the bowl I was talking about in yesterday's post. This piece, I feel, made the whole pet project worth it.  It's also from OU shino, but due to the firing and the pieces it was next to a lot of interesting things happened. The purple/red you see is from copper flashing from the piece next to it. You can see the gray spots where carbon was trapped. The little spots are actual indentions where the glaze crawled. Overall, it just turned out a lot cooler than I was expecting.

 I finally figured out/ was taught the correct way of doing coptic stitching! As a result have a little quarter sized booklet (60 pages). The booklet is actually an insert into a cover created with book board, glue, and some scrap booking paper. Another booklet design learned and tucked under my belt :p

There's something about the announcement of the last day to use wet clay that makes me put all other ceramic assignments aside and just start throwing as many bowls as I can... I don't know why, it just happens.  As a result I have 12 bowls that will need to be trimmed on Thursday and since I stayed late I was able to pug and reclaim all the scrap clay I've accumulated... so I'll be set to throw more bowls after trimming.

On a side note I also got to help load the kiln and had the honor of lighting one of the burners.  It was fun experience and after that I learned a lot from Dan who fired a couple of my bowls over spring break. He explained how one of my bowls ended up so interesting. (I forgot to take a picture AND to take it home... I'll show it later) But Shino is a very interesting and extremely finicky glaze.

I was kidnapped into going to Petco with friends. While there I had fun watching the rodents; there was a particularly cute female rat that kept cleaning herself...Anyway it took me a little bit to realize I actually had my camera with me and so I ended taking a couple videos of the more active animals and from there sketched a little.

Catch up post

Thursday before spring break:
    the two images below were experimentation with an origami envelope and a doodling of my hand

Friday before spring break:
   I bought a circle cutter. Using that I decided to practice my craft as well as experimenting




Monday of Spring break
   I saw some designer's packaging design for a cd so I decided to experiment too

Tuesday of Spring break:
       If you haven't noticed I have a weird fascination with notebooks. Here is an accordion book    design that I found particularly interesting

Wednesday of Spring break
   I needed to run some errands around campus and since I had my camera with me I decided to take some practice pictures for an eventual entry for the school's agenda photo

Thursday of Spring Break

    The night of the Midnight showing for the Hunger Games! My friends decided to dress up and since I was lazy and didn't I was given the role of photographer

Friday of Spring Break

  I stitched together all the cloud photos I took in photoshop to create some panoramic shots.