The older I get, the more I feel that there are so many talented artists around me. Back in elementary school, most people were only capable of badly colored drawings, often consisting of:

- Stick figures
- Houses that are just a triangle on top of a square
- Skies that are blue at the top but otherwise blank

By middle school it had improved quite a bit for some people, and by high school a few were drawing like pros. I find it funny, though, how almost every teacher I've met is terrible at drawing. The only exception is, yep, you guessed it, art teachers. The last art teacher I had, I think he used to be an illustrator. So of course if he wasn't a good artist he would've starved. (Well, maybe not starved, there are probably ways to get food...Like the lady I saw sneakily picking an orange from someone's tree because the orange was hanging out on the other side of the fence...)

Well, at this age, I guess people are starting to figure out what they're really passionate about and are deciding what they want to pursue, what they think is worth spending their time and effort doing. I know a lot of people who are pretty good at drawing, but there are a few who have really put in a lot of work and I especially want to point them out now.

One of them is my mom's friend's son. My mother just told me that he won the Fotodyne art contest. Apparently he spends a lot of time on a regular basis to improve his art and even goes to another city to practice sketching models (nude, I think, but it is important for artists to be able to draw the human body. After all, my art teacher said about naked people, "Eventually they become just another thing to draw"). If you want to see the full size version of his contest entry, click here. Actually, the style does remind me a bit of an artist on Pixiv. (Not that that's a bad thing. I greatly admire many of the Pixiv artists, wish I was more fluent in Japanese so I could understand more of what's there...Google Chrome's instant translate can be really confusing...)

As for the other person whose art has caught my attention, it is this artist. She has some very nice portraits in her gallery. Actually, a group in my Writing for Publication class last year made a documentary showing what three different people do on Saturday night. One of the people featured was her, and showed some of her drawings, as well as her practicing the guitar.

I must say that I really admire those who practice so much in order to better themselves. I've only ever had that kind of energy in brief fits, and I wish I could keep going at it long enough to make a significant change in my habits and my artistic abilities. I've been thinking maybe I should do something like the 365 days project, either with photography or drawing (or both!) so I'll be forced to practice at it every day. ...I just worry if I can come up with 365 good ideas... -_-;;

Labels: 365, art, change, contest, documentary, drawing, hard work, improvement, motivation, photography, pixiv, practice, project, winner, writing for publication

Lately I have been seeing just how bad people are at the ABCs and at counting. I was doing my piano theory homework. I try to do a little every week (but sometimes I forget or my teacher doesn't assign any. She's a bit on the lax side when it comes to teaching the theory. I think that's why we do "auditions" with a national association instead of a California one, since the California one requires you to take tests on piano theory). I took a close look at one of the pages and realized it was incorrectly labeled.

a.
b.
c.
e.

Where did D go? I know it's a small mistake that anyone would make, since we are all human, and probably no one would notice because it doesn't really stand out. But I still think it's rather silly to not know your alphabet.

And the situation with counting is even worse nowadays. One student said, "Is this really all the homework? It's just seven problems." Another student told him, "There are eight problems. "Well...I just didn't add one," said the first student.

In fact, students are so careless about their counting that the teacher must cover up the number line so students won't use it to help themselves on the STAR testing (California's standard tests that we have every year from 2nd-8th grade, if you're in another state). I was really amazed. I mean, is it really so bad that students can't even count to 50? Really. I can understand covering up maps and stuff like that since it can be pretty helpful sometimes. But a number line...

I always hear it's important to have a good foundation. Being able to count and knowing the 26 letters of the alphabet is something very basic and fundamental. If we pay so little attention to our simplest skills, I fear that we are on the road to disaster...

So I encourage you to spend your free time reciting your ABC's. And when you need to get to sleep, count sheep.

Labels: 123, ABCs, alphabet, attention, basic, count, cover, foundation, fundamental, map, number line, numbers, practice, problem, skills, sleep, STAR testing

It's supposed to be a play on the title of a movie, No Country for Old Men. Not sure if you caught the reference, though. (I haven't seen the movie either.)

The old man in particular is my father. (No offense intended to him, but he is getting on in his age.) My math teacher sends newsletters to the parents of his students about what he's been teaching, and lets them know about upcoming tests. My dad had stopped receiving the newsletters, so I brought a piece of paper to the teacher with the information needed for him to resume sending emails.

My father's memory and concentration seems to be off, because he didn't write his email address properly (missed three letters of it) and the teacher told me, "This email doesn't work." It's kind of sad that my dad doesn't even know his own email. (It's true that I sometimes forget my passwords, but that's because I keep so many of them.)

I wonder if anyone really writes letters anymore. I mean, my parents said they used to send Christmas cards, years back, but they don't any longer. (In fact, they don't really send Christmas e-cards either, which could mean they are losing their holiday spirit or are just getting lazy.) I remember when I was younger sometimes we would have a pen pal activity - each person would write a short letter to a person in another school that they were paired up with. I remember that it was a lot of fun...But we usually only exchanged one or two letters, and that's about it. It'd be much better if we could send them actively all year long. It might help improve our letter writing skills and it would be fun.

Today, my history teacher started talking about how us students aren't taking the opportunities that are given to us to sharpen our skills. He said that many kids are members of social networking sites and use instant messengers, but often they use chatspeak and don't bother to capitalize or punctuate properly. When they do add punctuation, it's probably a bunch of exclamation points. My teacher said that he had practiced typing and gotten really fast at it. But here we have plenty of chances to practice what with the time we spend on the computer, and yet we don't take it. (Reminds of this quote: "Opportunity comes knocking more than once. You just have to ready for it." I think it was in an old school planner)

I spent time in two different history teachers' classrooms recently - my regular history teacher, and another one who I've never had before. The reason is the rain...My PE teacher decided he would teach us about the cons of smoking, alcohol, and drugs while the weather was bad. We would go to that teacher's room (let's call him Mr. T) since it was his prep period (each teacher has one period where they don't teach, but are supposed to be making preparations for class or grading tests). Mr. T seemed to eat a lot of the kind of food called Cup Noodles.

Today my PE teacher left two minutes early, leaving us in the "care" of Mr. T, because he needed to go to the classroom for the next PE class (he uses a different classroom each period since the teachers have different prep periods). Mr. T decided to ask us what we had learned during our time of having PE inside.

Student: I learned that D talks a lot. (D stands for a different student's name)
Mr. T: You didn't know that before?
You know what's really amazing? D talks so much, but none of what comes out of his mouth has any meaning. The ratio of how much he speaks to how much of it is important is staggering.

Mr. T had brought in some food today, as well, in Whole Foods bags. Someone said they had seen cake and pizza. "What happened to your diet, Mr. T?" piped up D. (I did hear that Mr. T wanted to lose weight...) Mr. T said, "Hey, I'm fairly skinny, right?" (Well, I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But he ought not to have that attitude. Otherwise, the pounds will pile up again.)

Labels: christmas card, cup noodles, diet, email, father, letter, memory, newsletter, no country for old men, opportunity, password, PE class, pen pal, practice, skills, talkative, teacher, typing, weight

If you think of the summer as a performance, it starts off feeling exciting. You might have a case of the butterflies from stage fright, or maybe you're brimming with confidence and anticipation, or maybe you're hiding in the corner from dread. But either way, the whole performance is ahead of you yet. And then eventually you get to intermission (or if not that, you get halfway through the performance) and you're beginning to realize, "Oh, already that much of it is done, we'll be through not long from now." And then now it's almost time to take your bows. But when it comes to summer vacation, there is no encore. You will not get summoned back to the stage for another round of applause (except for the Staff Learning Days and stuff, but that's different).

I am afraid that my summer is draining away before my eyes. I have not made preparations for school and have basically procrastinated and poorly managed my time a whole lot this summer. Also, one of my friends who was visiting for the summer will be going on back to Taiwan not too long from now. Even the school schedules have been put up on our grade viewer (whether on accident or on purpose, I have no idea) and those are all definite signs that summer is coming to its end. I would like to ask you all, how were your summers? Did you put on a spectacular show? Or are you glad to have it over with? Or somewhere in between?

Now, I don't want to spend too much time dishing out sappy lines, so instead I would like you to take a look at some photos and drawings and critique them. You can find more of them on my DeviantArt account, link at the side of the posts. Click on them for full view.





Eek, I know my drawings are kind of messed up (like how I'm so lazy that I made the person in the first drawing put her - because it is a girl, but dressed as a boy?! - hands behind her back, and how I imitated Arina Tanemura's style in the second drawing) but oh well. Practice practice practice!

Labels: accomplishments, critique, drawing, encore, end, performance, photography, practice, summer, time, vacation

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