noahgibbs | (no subject)

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.

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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

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.