BIBLE

Bible is a wonderful Korean exchange student who is also at VCU for the art program. When I first met her, approximately 3 months ago, she could barely speak any English. But by now, she's practically fluent. She is in art history class with me and does a really good job of waking me up when I fall asleep. Plus she is the cutest thing to ever walk the Earth!!!!
I know "Bible" is kinda a funky name. In Korean it's Sung kyung, which directly translates to the Bible. Korea has a heavy Christian culture and her parents are also devoutly religious to Christ Jesus. So when it came time to name their first child and only daughter I guess it had to be good. For a while they were considering calling her "Mary" (or maybe the Korean version) but they soon realized that's way too plain and boring for someone so damn cute!
This is a picture of her and I guess a little taste of her art. She is really talented!

PROJECT: COMMUNICATIONS

This class was kinda odd. The teacher and I had a love-hate relationship. I was publicly kicked out of class once and unofficially kicked out another time. And one time I even jumped the teacher - like straight up attacked him. It was completely legitimate though. He tried to read my "art-journal-thingy" aloud to the class.
Even though this class was predominately hell I definitely learned a lot from this class. Like believe it or not the importance of sketchbooks and observations as artistic inspirations. I'm going to try for this department next semester. The idea of drawing 24/7 isn't the greatest thing in the world. But I love video games and as a former yearbooker I appreciate editorial illustrations. Plus working internationally sounds amazing and is something I've always wanted to do.
The pictures are of My friend Stanley and his roommate who are both in the department of Communications. They collaborated and each painted themselves in this artwork. Pretty sweet!

ART HISTORY

In this class we've studied prehistoric art up to early renaissance. This is my very first lecture class and has about 100 students in the hall. Things move quite quickly. So you either have to be a fast typer or just really well prepared - I tend to fall under the former category.
Other than the piles on historic knowledge embedded in my brain, I've learned it's best not to sleep during class and that if there's one place to have a cell phone go off that certainly isn't the place.
The picture is the Winged Victory of Samothrace from 3rd century Greek art. Was meant to represent the Greek goddess Nike (or Victory).

QUINN

So on a random tangent.... My best friend who is practically my brother (we were 16 in the picture; we have the exact same birthday, born less than a couple hours apart). He is finally back from boot camp and is officially a marine. He left in September so I've been freaking out since then until yesterday when I saw him for the first time after the longest time we've ever been separated in our lifelong friendship.
But I think I'm freaking out more now. He's so different. My charismatic, sarcastically hilarious, talkative, and compassionate friend is gone. He barely speaks, even to me. Which is really weird. I think it's weird because I know it's only gonna get worse. He's infantry and is headed for Iraq on the front line as a marine in about 3 months. But he'll be gone from Richmond in less than 3 weeks.
I'm not used to having a stone as a best friend....

FOCUSED INQUIRY

At first I was really nervous having a Russian teacher as my professor for an English-wanna-be class. But this "obvious high school goth" as my friends and I both confirmed based on her striped attire, dark palette, and sarcastic sense of humor, has really done more for this English class than I ever anticipated. This class is basically meant to introduce students to college life. It focuses on our roles in the university, Richmond, the United States, and now the world. We only do 2 things in this class: write and speak.
Draft after draft of paper after paper has hopefully improved my writing skills. Also I think my oral speech has improved since we give presentations every week. My knowledge of Richmond went up, which is kind of pathetic. I've lived in Richmond for my whole life and there was still so much that I didn't know about the city.

DRAWING STUDIO

Well in Drawing Studio... we draw.... a lot! We've worked with materials from charcoal to ink to conte crayon to graphite to acrylic paint. For the first half of the semester we began most of our studies with impossible still-lifes that just kept getting bigger and bigger. The second half consisted of figure drawing. So naked people for 3 hours a day, twice a week. I gotta say though, people are way more fun to draw than any still life.
Before entering Drawing Studio I honestly thought that there was really only one way to draw. But that's not exactly true. I used to and still on occasions concentrate heavily on one area when I draw and then move to the next area. But I get bad grades when I do that... At VCU they prefer to "Build up the forms" for two reasons: 1) supposedly better technique and 2) no matter what time you have to stop that drawing will always look some what complete because it's all equally developed.
This is one of my works. For about 3 weeks we drew skeletons everyday. Imagine walking in with 3 skeletons and 2 addition skulls dressed and set up like a Mexican Day-of-the-Dead fiesta; it's rather intimidating at 8:45 in the morning.

JEVON

Jevon is the "strawberry flavor in everyone's life." Well that and he's the guy I normally sit next to in time studio, harass, and steal hats from. Even though he works at Best Buy, which is the enemy to my workplace, CompUSA, I still associate with him.

TIME STUDIO

This itself is my project for my Time Studio class. This class deals with elements of time... shockingly enough. Photography, cinematography, and temporary art. In this class we've done lots of tedious projects like flip-books, Flash animation, photo sequencing, and even performance art.
I would have to say the number one thing I learned in this class was failure. Yeah, kind of a depressing thought, but very true. Drawing I get as well as painting and printmaking and all that jazz. But I never realized I could actually suck at art or have to redo projects so many times for minimal satisfaction until I got into this class. (I'M HUNGRY!) So I guess my big learning experience in this class was more a mental realization that failure is quite possible,and I can't assume that no matter what I'm going to rock at everything. Haha. I swear I'm not as cocky as I sounded, I was just genuinely surprised by the level of frustration "not succeeding" brings a person.
Although technically I also learned the programs Flash and iMovie... and that I need to start bringing food the classes that are 3 hours long!!!
This video is of my itty-bitty flip book featuring my younger brother and his tongue.