Going into hyperdrive...

So, I haven't done too much art lately... but that's about to change big time! Since last week I'm enrolled in two classes at San Jose State University (through open University): a painting class and a lithography class. Classes meet 2x a week and I plan to spend plenty of additional time working on projects at the school and create lots of work. This work might go into slightly different directions than my other stuff because some of it will be done for the classes, but that's good. It will teach me specific skills or will force me to work in ways I haven't worked before. Which again will improve my skills as an artist.

Here is a first example of a simple (?) exercise we did today: play with depth of field by creating a very simple abstract grid using ideally only value, for instance just raw umber and white. I found this a pretty interesting exercise because it teaches you about working with light, how to focus light on parts of your composition, how to guide the viewer's eye, how to work with depth and so forth. Here is the piece I came up with. I think it's actually quite interesting, but, obviously, I need to do this a few more times to really get the hang of it.

I'll continue posting things here every now and then to talk about interesting things we do in class. Of course I also work some on my other art projects, but progress on those might be a bit slower for a while. We'll see :)

Oh, and below are a few photos of the printing studio where I will spend a lot of time now. Obviously this is like a toy store for me! Look at all those presses!!! And that's just one of the rooms (this one has 4 intaglio presses, and 3 letter presses in it. There are also 5 Litho presses in the other room etc. etc.)