Weekend in Wilmington

This past weekend, David came to camp to see the talent show.  My camper did a fashion show and was awarded the "Long walks on the beach" award (because of the slow, yet romantic, pace at which he walked around camp for the week).  My friend Jean had a friend in Wilmington with a house about 5 minutes away from the beach.  So, after the talent show ended on Friday, David, Me, Jean, Andy and Elisabeth drove there.  

Highlight of the weekend: Skinny-dipping in the ocean with Elisabeth

I'm a survivor

Matilda!

I made it through my first day of camp.  Granted, it was a half day, but I successfully tucked both campers into their beds after two grueling showers.  Today was fun-filled with basketball, a pizza dinner, a luau with bubbles and chalk-drawing, a hayride and the first 15-minutes of the movie Matilda.  And I don't think that I'll be eating much this week because between feeding the two, I don't really have time to feed myself.  Anyway, I'll write more later.  Signing off...

Where are my clothes?

I finally assembled that series of sharpie drawings into a "book".  Using scraps of cardboard, random construction paper I found in the drawing room, string to match and ink on stamps we have:

The s in clothes is under the e in clothes, hidden by a piece of string.

Classic accordion-fold shot

The title was inspired by a classmate who did a series of drawings on a friend looking for a cellphone.  The title was "Where is my phone?" and, since we had just come out of a conversation about how I've drawn myself naked a few times, I decided that it would be funny to name my book "Where are my clothes?".

After I finished the book, I went over to the ceramics studio to take photos of some of my work that came out of the kiln firing recently.  I'm always posting pictures of random drawings but never any sculptures or pottery so, I thought it would be nice to get some variety going in this blog: 

Flip-book in the making

For homework we had to draw, in gestural line or continuous line/contour, a series of bodies in motion.  Today in class, we're making them into books of the accordion-fold style.  Here's mine so far:

Oh, I almost forgot

to tell what happened in Life Drawing today. 

We have only been using the two female models (the old runner and the young dancer).  Today, though, Tom, a rotund, over-the-hill, man modeled for us with a giant walking stick and a lot of character.  He looked like this guy, kind of:

Taken from here

But, it was also like looking at this:

Which I've seen in person at the Hirshhorn in D.C. before

No model

Drawing II today.  So far we've been exposed to (or exposed by, depending on how you think of it) two models.  One is a trim older woman who I adore.  She's always in a good mood and very friendly, talking to the students during break.  The other is a woman who is probably a little older than the average Elon student.  She's a dancer and when I found this out at the beginning of the year, I thought that she was going to be able to pose in very elegant ways and with the strength of an ox or something.  However, she doesn't really seem to know how to model.  Not to be mean or anything, but she can't hold her poses for very long and needs inspiration/direction about what types of poses are appropriate.  She's probably trying her hardest, though, and that's what matters.  I actually haven't had that much of a problem with her until recently.  

Recently she started arriving very late to class.  My professor likes to start the class right on time with the model (I've walked into class before with the model already posing naked on the podium!).  But my professor can't always start class because this model is late.  One time she was twenty minutes late until she called to tell us that she was sick and wasn't going to make it.  Today, though, she was scheduled to come again and was late (or so we thought) as usual.  We're learning how to really exaggerate foreshortening so we started using our own images in the mirror to do this while we waited for her (we put our arms and hands out infront of ourselves so that our hands looked bigger than our heads for an effect like this, this or even this).  

As you can probably guess, she never showed up.  No phone call, no nothing.  She was a no-show.  Because of this, my classmates became the models (clothed of course)!  Four of my classmates got to take a nap while laying down in the center of the class on a podium covered with eggshell foam padding.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.  My class is from 1 - 4 p.m. and this is prime nap-time.  It's really hard to sit still and draw for three hours and sometimes all I want to do is take a nap (I've often fantasied about switching places with the models).  There is a nice heater that my professor points at the models so that they don't get cold, so it wouldn't be that bad. 

In other news, Stephanie has been cooking a lot and tonight she made a delicious meal of Salmon with brown sugar, yellow rice, salad and herb bread.  It was yummy!

Love,

Monica

Possible nudity

My Drawing II class is going to be fun.  There are only nine people and we will have a live model to observe from each class.  Tuesday, we didn't have a human model available to draw from so my teacher brought in her dog.  It was just a little bit awesome.  She said that tomorrow we need to be on time for sure because we have our first live model.  She's modeled for classes before and is a fifty-some female bodybuilder.  Interesting, no?  Oh, and did I mention that there is a man in his sixties that is a student in my class?