Beautiful inside my Mind

Sorry for the lack of posting. I've been having some mood swings (a.k.a. homesickness). It's a lot better now though. Life is tough but there are times when I really love what I'm doing. I truly want to stay.

The second week of school is almost over, so I thought I'd talk a bit about my life. I usually wake up around 6.30 in the morning to prepare for my lessons, which start at 8am on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I pack my lunch and art materials (which are a LOT). My hands are almost always full and for the first few days I suffered from body aches because I wasn't used to the weight.

I take my own lunch because the food over here is expensive compared to Singapore, and because I'm spending a lot on supplies and school fees already. Lunch is usually leftovers from the previous night's dinner, or a quick sandwich. In the morning we have to wait a while for the elevator in school, because there are many people getting to class at that time. For studio classes I arrive 10-15 min. early to set up my working area.

I have 7 classes in total- 4 studio (art) classes and 3 liberal studies classes. And I consistently have homework for all of them. The studio classes are Drawing and Composition (perspective), Form and Space (constructing basic forms), Life Drawing (analysing the inner structure of the body), and Principles of Design (basic design theory and expressing simple concepts). The bracketed words are what I'm doing for each class now- we'll progress to doing other things like constructing more complex sculptural forms in Form & Space, doing more expressive figure drawings in Life Drawing and using design software in Principles of Design.

My favourite studio classes are Life Drawing and Design. For Life Drawing we literally draw 'life' from a nude model. Last week we had a female model; this week a male one. We study anatomy and the mechanics of the body in order to illustrate the figure accurately- it's all very scientific right now. For example I can name all the major bones of the skeleton already, and some time later we have to draw the skeleton from memory in a test (?!). Life Drawing is immensely frustrating but potentially very rewarding. Design class is fun- we get to play around with how to express certain concepts and use varying shapes and lines to come up with original and interesting designs.

My liberal studies (academic) classes are Visual Culture/ Art History, English Lit. and Cultural Studies. All of them are pretty interesting. We do weekly readings and blog responses, and later on we'll have to submit papers. But the papers are not in 'paper' form- it's in electronic format (sort of like a website) which is more fun as we can play around with visuals like font and graphics to best express our ideas. I think it's more useful for our role as artists and designers as well.

Wednesday is my longest day as I'm in school from 8am-6.30pm. But on the morning of that day there's a Farmers' Market opposite the school. During lunch break I'd walk over there to check out the food. There's a combination of fresh produce and prepared snack food like tamales and lemonade. It's a great way to get away from lessons for a bit.

I'm usually exhausted by the time I get home. I do some homework, shower and have dinnner, clean up and read a little of my notes before I sleep. There isn't much to do at night without a car as it's dangerous to go out. I go to bed at 10.30-11 to get a good night's sleep. I'm an anomaly though as my friends often stay up til 1 or so.

Ok so I've described a good deal of my life already. I'll try to blog a few times a week. In the following posts I'll be showing a bit of my apartment and the food I eat.