(no subject)

[noahgibbs]

Haven't updated in a few days.

My figure-sculpting class was okay on Sunday, but I've been finding it frustrating lately. Trish is supposed to be a really good teacher and she's definitely a cheerful human being, but a lot of her advice seems to just slip right past me. It being a sculpture class she'll start fixing something or making something or put a chunk of clay somewhere, and I'm just not seeing why. It would probably make more sense if I understood more about the way she constructed larger stuff.

Voice dynamics was pretty good. I'm not sure how to use some of what I was told, but I can try to play with it. I *do*, at least, have one nice concrete hint about getting people to be able to hear me better, along with the usual reminder not to talk so fast. I was also told by Lusty that I read really fast, fast enough that she has trouble keeping track. I hadn't known that -- I basically figured that if I could read, do the voices, get all the intonations right and read a couple of sentences ahead then whoever I was reading to must be able to keep up, and that they were probably already frustrated at the pace :-) Guess not.
Changed my motorcycle's oil on Saturday. Lusty helped lots, and the whole thing was surprisingly painless. I should probably get that odd filter wrench for the bike, and see if any of my current set of ratchet heads fits the drain bolt. Not a big deal, and it doesn't need to be done all that soon.

I'm tired. I need catastrophes to stop occurring for a couple of weeks so that I can plan a day of, say, sleeping. But then, the chances of me having an entire *day* with nothing scheduled are pretty low for awhile. Work M-F, class on Saturday this coming week, and Sundays for awhile. The house needs a lot of random things like mopping and vacuuming, and I haven't been eating at home nearly enough.

But I *have* been getting a little reading done. I can heartily recommend "Harmful to Minors" by Judith Levine. Its premise is that the way that conservatives "protect" children from sex just doesn't work, and it's worse for the children than the programs that were displaced. It's the same sort of points that Pat Califia has made on the same topic, expanded into a full-on book, and supported with many more references, examples and statistics.

Comments

[stephtoth.livejournal.com]

OOh! I"ve been wanting to read that book! _The Nation_ did a really great review of it in their last issue, so I tried to get it from the local library, but they didn't have a copy :( So I put in a request that they buy a copy. I havn't heard back, but hopefully they will get it, and when they do, I get to read it first! ;)

[safya.livejournal.com]

i think the reading too fast out loud problem is actually a pretty common one. i'm thinking that maybe this is because when you're reading to yourself you might read along quite quickly, but then every once in a while you pause and sort of summarize to yourself or something (at least i do) it's sort of subconscious, but i really notice when someone else is reading out loud that i wish they would just stop more often...unless it's a really familiar text where i already know what's going on, and then it's more likely the opposite, which might be why this happens--my guess is that if you're doing voices and all that you're probably already familiar with the text, while your listeners might not be. at least, that's what occurs to me...

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I definitely tend to already be familiar with the book. I tend to figure that the extra time during the "slow sentences" -- time when relatively little is happening for a paragraph or so -- is when listeners summarize. I know I tend to do the same while reading the book to myself :-)

But yeah, I know that reading to myself I do it quite fast. It's just that while reading to somebody else I read much slower, since I have to get all the phrasing and tones and stuff right. When it's just me I don't have to read ahead or anything since I can just fix who said what or what the sentence should have emphasized in the privacy of my own mind.

[skamille.livejournal.com]

I bought a copy of "Harmful to Minors" after Salon did an excellent article on it. I haven't actually read much past the introduction though... must admit that I mostly bought it to support the author/publisher because of all the bullshit they had to go through to get it published. I will get around to reading it one of these days.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I've read four or five chapters so far. I'm pretty impressed.

[lusty.livejournal.com]

I was in an oil painting class once, and trying to paint a wooden table with some vase or something sitting on it. There was a reflection of the blue vase on the wood of the table, and I was trying to paint that part by applying blue-ish paint to the canvas. The teacher came by several times, scraped away my blue, and painted in some brown, without explaining to me why she was doing that. Each time, after she left, I scraped away her brown and put my blue back in. Eventually, she realized she needed to actually explain to me why she was doing that, and it made perfect sense to me. Has your teacher tried to explain why she's doing the things that don't make sense to you?

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Sort of. It's sculpting, so there are limits to how much she can explain. She explains that it "flows that way" or some such, which doesn't much help me -- my current version is higher than the surface of the object, and she's adding more on top, so it seems like she's taking something I've done wrong and made it more so. But then, if *she* were doing it, that might be an area she'd smooth down later. Damned if I know.

I know that some of what she's doing is making up for the way clay moves. For instance, if you have a seated figure looking up, make the clay version look *way* up -- and keep fixing it. It'll keep looking down on its own, so if you have it close to the actual head level, you'll wind up with one staring at its feet. There are, I'm sure, a lot of problems like that. As is so often the case with artists who've been doing it for awhile, the fact that I can phrase that fact appropriately doesn't mean we can communicate. If she was still awkward enough to know *what* she was doing, she wouldn't be good at doing it.

I'm reminded of my colored pencil teacher. She spent a lot of time trying to get me to make things more "interesting" colors. We debated for about a half-hour before I was able to communicate that if you start with the color something *is*, and then make it a more interesting color, that it's not the same color any more. I mean, even if they're both approximately black, anything you do to make your version more interesting than the original makes it less like the original. That's not saying you can't make something a more interesting color, but it really took that long just to communicate that fact.

It was a surprisingly long time before she understood that concept at all, even a little bit. As with many similar *really* irritating situations, it goes from being "that's not true!" to "oh, yeah, duh, of course" on some invisible axis.

[safya.livejournal.com]

that color thing really weirds me out. it took me the longest time to figure out that the reason i thought lots of people's art looked better than mine was because of all these colors they used that weren't really there...somehow if it's done well i just thought it looked cool, i often didn't notice that there were weird colors thrown in. now i'm all about that, though, and the things i make tend to exist in a totally different spectrum than the real world.

i don't know anything about sculpting, i never did much of that. but if i had a quote file i'd definitely be saving the phrase "If she was still awkward enough to know *what* she was doing, she wouldn't be good at doing it"...i imagine that is often the case

[stephtoth.livejournal.com]

color's neat. I mean, really, all the colors are there. Some are just reflected more than others. And then your eyes are just crazy, with what they'll see changing from moment to moment. Stare at your skin long enough. There are so many more colors in there than "peach." Or whatever crayon you would choose from the box for skin. I loved learning that the "old masters" would paint people completly green before going over with skin color to give it the depth that it needed. And if you stare long enough, there is green in your skin. And everything else.
Shadows are another great thing. What a revelation the day I learned to really look at the colors in shadows, instead of just putting black over things. shadows arn't black, they're just a darker shade of whatever they are on.
I pretty much just never use black unless I absolutly need to. Dark blues and greens look so much richer.