My Job and Life

Having a job has taught me so much. I'm really understanding adulthood, budging, business, and responsibility in general. A year ago, I never thought that I'd have a job, and now that I do, it's nothing like I expected. 

Having money is the best part. It's something I really can't explain because it's so awesome. At least for me it is. I hate having to ask my parents for anything, and now, I really don't have to. If I need something, I can go and buy it. Two months ago when I bought a subscription to Spotify and I was terrified because I thought that my parents would get mad for me not consulting them. They didn't because it's my money. I choose that it's something I want to invest in because I hate having to buy and download all my music. But, it's more than small purchases like Spotify, I also have made pretty big purchases, and it has been my decision. This February, I'm going to Quebec with the French class. I saved up for four months and got enough to pay for myself. There is something so gratifying about being able to do that. No one could tell me that the trip was too expensive because I was paying for it. And, this summer, I'm going backpacking across Europe, and I'm saving all my money for that too. I can do the things I want to because I have the money for it. And I calculate how much I am allowed to spend out of what I make to still have enough. Taking economics now, during the first semester, has really helped with that. I realized that I have a lot of money, and spending it on stupid things just doesn't make sense. I can almost anything I want, but to have the things and experiences I really want, I need to be smart.

The shitty part is that I work a lot. Especially during the time I have off. Vacations aren't vacations because I have to work. Weekends aren't any better than schools days when I have an eight hour shift. My social life has dwindled, and my ability to produce art has also taken a hit. I love having a job, but I have having to go. It brings structure to my life, but being creative becomes difficult when I have to adhere to a schedule. That's where my thoughts bring me to the future. Having a job I can't stand being in isn't an option. I need a career that is as flexible as I am. 

I recently saw a documentary on the life and careers of Lella and Massimo Vignelli, and I envy them so much. They had the life I dream of. Their work was never boring or meaningless, it was never for a paycheck or stability. They did what they did because they loved design. I want a career where I can do what they did; getting paid to make something functional and beautiful. They have become my new idols in a way. Their foreign to the United States, which I admire because they're bilingual, and they're so intelligent. Listening to them talk is like having your mind blown every moment. They both died this year, and it's a shame that I'm just now discovering who my idols are right after they've died.

I think my life can be wonderful. Knowing how to spend my money and having a job that is fulfilling is all I need to be content. 

Beginnings

In my opinion, starting projects are normally the easiest part of the process. I never had a problem starting a project, and for me, I see problems seeing those projects through. I don't fear beginning something because when you first start something, you have nothing to ruin, but once you continue a project you have put a lot of effort into, it becomes difficult to make changes and finish it because of the fear of messing it up. I do, like most humans, have a level of procastination that I have to deal with. I put off starting the things I'm uncertain about because I fear getting myself into a situation where I have to deal with failure. I don't see this problem very much in my artwork because, but rather in my school work. I think that working on a piece of art allows for easy beginnings because of a relatively low level of preparation involved. Art is whatever you want it to be, so you can manage the fear far easier because the requirements are set by yourself. Writing a paper on a topic I know nothing about is scarier than starting a painting of a horse. I've never studied drawing horses, so after my first couple of sketches, I could realize that it'd be better in my ability to just draw it's head. With school work, you're expected to finish it within the parameters of what will get you a good grade, which is why I put off starting school projects.

Overall, beginning isn't a big fear of mine. I have started far more things than I've finished. If I am working and I can't finish a piece because I'm not comfortable with where it's going, I just stop working on it. That mentality allows me to continue to work without a fear of starting because I know that most of what I start won't be a fully realized piece. The fear of starting goes away when you know that most of what you're making isn't going to be present as a finished piece. 

I never push myself too far in regards to my art. I never set myself up for something that I don't think I can realistically do. This is especially evident in when I write plays and movie scripts. If I had it so that I was setting myself up to have to do very difficult things in movies, then starting would be much more scarier. The elevator movies we had to make are a great example. I wasn't thinking of a cool idea as much as I was thinking of a plausible idea. I wanted to make something that could be turned out quickly and easily. I knew that it'd be hard to cast boys so I wrote the script to have two girls, and I made it so that nearly anyone could have played the parts. The shots were all easy and could be changed quickly if they didn't work. Because of that, starting filming on Friday wasn't a problem for me at all because I knew that I could get it done. 

Fear

I've encountered my fair share of fear in my artistic process. Fear is something that every artist has to deal with because as much as it is a block for creating work, fear makes us human. One of the biggest things I've noticed about fear and work is that there is a lot more fear when your work is supposed to mean something, or be for something. When I first started my 365, there really wasn't much fear at all. I wasn't expecting to create work for anything. No one could judge my art poorly because I was literally just starting, and I wasn't working anyone expect myself. As much as I continue to try and do that, it gets significantly harder the more serious I take my work. I'm scared about people thinking I'm not good enough. The excuse that I'm new at all of this isn't true anymore, so every piece I make, I'm conscious of how people might view it. I can say that truthfully, this hasn't helped my process as much. Gone are the days when I can draw faces from pictures on the internet for hours. That's "plagiarism" according to colleges and the AP. That was my go to process. Coming up with sketches and trying to make the pieces exciting and new, that's what's scary. I liked the simplicity of what it used to be. Experimenting without judgement or consequence. I don't have a problem producing work, but I can say that I would be producing much more if I didn't have so much fear.
In regards to my tent project, a big block in that is fear. I could push myself to try and get it done, but I have almost no idea what to do with it. I've never done anything like it before, so I'm scared that I'd fail. There is research I'd have to do, and materials I'd have to gather, and then the assembly. I've come to a point where I know what I want to do, I know what I want it to look like, but I have no idea how to physically make it. Making work I'm comfortable with eliminates the need to fear it. I know how to draw a face, so doing that instead is normally what ends up happening when I work on it.
One of the best ways to work through fear, from my experience, is to work a lot on a the thing you're scared of, in tiny practices so that you can go through the failure quickly without worrying about it having consequences. Quick figure drawings are a great example. A bad thirty second gesture drawing means almost nothing because your investment was so tiny, but if you do a lot of them, then drawing bodies becomes easy and comfortable.

Artistically, I have been having problems lately. Really for the entire school year I've been having problems with the work I'm making. I just hate some of what I'm making. I literally look at it, and dread having to touch it. I feel that everything I'm making now is so far from what I want it to be. It feels heavy and just opposite of the way that I work. I haven't been able to just draw in a long time. Everything I do has that connotation that it needs to be a finished product, rather than sketches or quick pieces. I have problems with composition, and that's very apparent when I'm trying to set a up a painting. The work that I make feels like executing out a plan. I have blueprints and I work to make that blueprint a reality. I much rather prefer making that blueprint. When I start projects on sketch paper, I love it. I make it so that it works with graphite or charcoal, and I find it difficult to transfer those pieces to larger paintings. The spontaneity of painting that I was so accustomed to feels like it's gone. I wish I could take everything I know now, and put that into my mind two years ago. I could do so much more with that time. And by having a larger body of work and more experience, what I have to go through now would feel a lot less intense.
I feel like I'm putting off making the art I want until after college application are due because I feel that what I want to do isn't what colleges want to see. It's depressing, and I shouldn't think that way, but it's hard to think any other way sometimes. After applications I'm going to dive into technique again. I need practice with basics and get away from my goal being finished pieces. I want to paint and draw more of the things that give me difficulty, rather than try and avoid those things like how I do it in my current pieces.
I feel that I'm forcing myself into a block, but it'll only last another month, so that's not unbearable.  I want to get back to focusing on myself next year. My apps are due January 1st, so a lot of what I'm thinking about, fits right into the idea of a new years resolution. I want to start to get myself happy again next year so that I can accomplish more. I feel that technically, I haven't grow in a while, and that bothers me because I know that I could be doing much more.

In addition, I wanted to reflect a little on my first paid job. I feel sometimes that it takes over my life, even though it doesn't take over most of my time. Like for example, I don't like to change before I get to work because it takes too long and I don't want to have to carry around more clothes in my already heavy bag, so most of my style is variations on my work uniform. Also, sometimes I feel like I'm on call. At least once a week, someone from the bakery will call me and ask me to cover for someone or work an extra day. I say no and then all of a sudden I'm unreliable. The truth is that I don't care very much about that bakery or what happens to it, but I am expected to care. I don't want my job in the future to do that to me. If I truly care about what I'm doing then that'd be great, but this automatic expectation that my boss has for her employees is that everyone is willing to do anything for the bakery. I don't want to invest in this. I do the job I'm paid to do. I don't want to do any extra because I don't care enough. I'm a fucking artist and I'm getting pressured to dip cookies in chocolate like it's the end of the world. That's not worth my stress. The only thing that keeps me wanting to come back is that I know that by saving all my money, I can have enough to travel. I plan to go to Europe this summer and explore. I don't know exactly where I'm going, but that's part of the adventure. I surrender a part of my freedom so that I can experience a better different freedom later down the road. It's poetic and works like a mantra on those days when everything feels like shit. It's Thanksgiving this week, and there goes what ever vacation I might have had. I've never had to work on a serious holiday before like Thanksgiving, so the feeling is weird. I wish that I could be able to juggle the job like a hobby, but lately it feels like a defining factor of who I am.

Reflecting on this Film

It's done.

To say we didn't run into problems with filming would be a lie. To say we fucked the whole thing up would also be a lie. I don't want to lie in this blog post, so I'll say the truth; we didn't focus enough when we should of. Really it's my fault, since I signed up to be the leader of the project.

The first two days of filming went really smoothly. We had a schedule and we knew exactly what we were doing. I think that's where we ran into problems later.

What I liked:
Vika's house is a perfect place to film. It's has so many parts and angles that we made her one space feel like three separate houses. It fits the film tonally and gave the film personality. I also really liked Jzabelle's acting. It was surprising how good she was from having little experience. The camera doesn't love a lot of people, but it loves Jzabelle. I tell her to do act bigger and she actually does it. She does her best work when she's comfortable and I think she loved all the parts she had in the movie. She had to be distinctively different with each of her appearances to really justify having her play all the smaller parts. I was talking to her about how she should go about doing her police officer part, and she really bought into it. I used a trick I had learned a couple years ago in STAC to get people to act for the camera, I told to practice the movements and lines so I could see how it looked on the camera without actually filming it, but I would be filming it. It worked. But it didn't need to, because she did great without it in the next shot too. Really everyone's acting was pretty good, apart from mine. I had a problem with it, but by the time I was editing, I decided to let it go. I would normally take many shots so that I could get the acting totally right, but when I'm not filming, I don't know if what I had just done was okay or not. I should have looked back after every take to see if I was good or not, but I didn't, and now I know that I should. I had never really been in a group where I was the most experienced filmmaker, so if I ever needed to play a part in other films, I could rely that everyone else would note my acting, like in Shiana's film last year, I was constantly having to redo everything because Shiana was extremely picky, which was a trait I tried to reflect in this film, but even here I should have done more.

What I didn't:
After editing the first bit of what we had filmed on the first day, I came back and realized that there was a plot hole in my script. I had it that Vika and Grace went straight from the hospital to the sperm daddy's house. When they leave the hospital, and are in the car, you do not know where they are going. This problem is solved within a couple of seconds because of a line Vika has that explains why they're there and who my character was. I tried to fix it, but I didn't write anything to fill that gap, I just asked Vika and Grace to improvise, which I found out was a mistake. We spent a good half an hour trying to do that, and almost everything we got to fix the plot hole was useless because it either looked bad, or the fix would have changed more than that specific scene, and I didn't want to go and refilm the hospital scene because I had edited it already and I realized that adding any more dialog would have ruined the fast paced feeling that the scene needed. The other problem was the last scene. I wrote a scene that was way too out there. It would have taken another day entirely to film that one part, and the chances of it being confusing were extremely high. Especially because it takes place in Vika's tiny bathroom, where not only is it hard to get a good angle, but also because I had to make sure that we never actually saw the baby in the bathtub, because it wasn't actually there because we don't have a baby, real or fake, that we can get wet. Also, we had to film that entire sequence in 25 minutes because we were running out of time and I couldn't stay after even for a second. If there was one thing I could fix, it would have been that. We spent far too much time fooling around that day, because we didn't have much to film, and we had started late because we were waiting for Emily to finish her musical preview thing.

Overall, I like the film. It's funny and it was fun to make. You feel more comfortable when you're making something that's supposed to be ridiculous. Buddy films are just that normally, two people going on an adventure doing silly things, and that's exactly what it feels like.

Recently I purchased a standing mirror, because Egon Schiele had one and I thought that it would be a good investment. Honestly, it was. I've realized recently that there are different moods to when I create art, and I make different products in those different moods. Whenever I am in Ganes' class, and in most cases drawing from imagination, I am not focused, and the work I make is shows that. Because these pieces are worked on for for weeks, but only for about half and hour a day, they seem all over the place, and there is a lot more detail on the mindless work that I hate. Like for a piece I'm working on now,  I am using reflective paper and attaching it to my piece to look like a broken mirror. It's work I would never do at home, and it's very time consuming. The feeling I get with the mirror is very different. I start something and then I have to finish it. My mind goes to a place that it doesn't in a classroom, and the work I make, I like more. Really, I don't like working anyplace besides my room. I need a certain environment to get that feeling that creates work I like. And I need time. Just because I have an hour of free time, doesn't mean I can just spent it drawing. I realize that I don't start actually getting good, and getting that feeling I like unless I've been working for at least an hour or two. It's complicated to explain, but it's like a spectrum. I can only create a certain type of work at the beginning of my drawing, and only after that can I really get focused and do the work I like.
I've been working a lot on my portfolio lately. I hate all the bullshit besides that. There is so much I have to do besides my art to go to school which really doesn't make sense to me. I wish I could run away and work on art for a month without anyone bothering me. There are things I want to learn but it always feels like there is something in my way that is preventing me from learning those things. What's the point of being a student if you have that problem. My job is to learn, but right now, it feels like my job is to fill out forms and sit through useless classes. Even this year, I spent so much time trying to create a perfect schedule, but I still find the same problems. I'm not learning French and Spanish at the speed I want to, art class is basically a lunch period without food, and english, economics and health are things to fill time. It doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, and that makes me angry. That's why I'm excited for college. No matter where I end up going, all the schools I'm applying to have foundation years. Spending a year just drawing and designing is what I long for. My average day is waking up at six, sit through classes all day, spend four hours a work, and then come home and do my homework for two hours. I can't learn if my life feels like a wheel turing the same way everyday. Weekends save me. I can paint and draw, while I listen to french and spanish music and that teaches me more than everything else I do.

Tent Project

Tents are confusing. Don't deny it, because you know they are. Why? That's the question the drives me into this project. Why does a tent need to be confusing? You should be able set it up and be chilling in your habitation within ten minutes.

So I started thinking. When I was little, I had a tent that would bend up and fit into a bag. It required no set up and the most difficult part of the process was putting the tent away. Starting from that point, it can become difficult to expand the idea. The tent itself wasn't sturdy. The poles that would hold it up were far to weak to withstand a night outdoors, so I was stuck. I don't know much about materials, in fact, figuring out what materials to use is still something that I find problems with now. That was the first block I had, so I decided to change the approach that I had. I was still looking at a tent through the old fashion idea of what a tent is. I took a step back and started to approach this like a designer. 

First I looked at what would be the easiest way to make a shelter. Legos. Legos inspired this whole project because they're easy. A three year old child can create a house out of legos. I translated that into the image of a tent and ended up with three boards that clicked together and created a pyramid. Immediately I encountered problems. Large boards aren't portable and even with conservative material usage, they'd be heavy. But that didn't stop me. The idea of pieces that just clicked together would work. So then I took a look at actual tents again. Fabric and poles are what normal tents are made out of, so I found my solution there. Rather than build a tent, the fabric and poles would build the triangular boards, which would then be assembled into a tent. Using the same materials as a normal tent meant that you had the same ease of portability. The best thing about modern-day tents is their portability, so my tent would have that same advantage in addition to it's ease of assembly. 

I spent a variety of days playing around with proportions with paper.

And on google sketchup 

Now I've reached the most difficult part so far of the project, and that's physically creating it. 

Connection is the hardest part. How will the fabric connect to the poles? How will the boards that are made connect with each other? These are the questions that I'm facing now.

In addition, I'm using other design idea I've been reading about to finish this project. For example, color coded poles. Using similar colors to signify what goes together means that the confusion of what pole is used for what goes away, and many of the poles are interchangeable because two of the three walls are the exactly the same.