Finished Pumpkin Baby! :)

Pumpkin Baby progress...

Just a little more to go...

B-Dizzle

So Jasper has been calling Bryce B-Dizzle and Bryce-O for quite a while now....he started calling him that while he was on his mission sometime. It makes me laugh every time and i've started calling him that myself sometimes-especially when his hair is all messy and sticky-outie... hehehe.

But i think he can get away with hair like that any day dressed like that.... ;)

Pumpkin Baby!!

My friend Brooke asked me to do this drawing of her nephew so she can give it to her sister and brother in law for christmas. He's such a doll. :)

So here's my my start--just a line drawing from the picture...

Here's a little later but still just a line drawing...

This is what I did yesterday.

I'll be finishing it today and giving it to her tomorrow right before she leaves to fly home .... talk about procrastination huh? (i've known i needed to draw this since about October.... :)

ooooh...

oh baby! ;)

hOLy shaMOLY!!!! Bryce is moving out in less than a week.....holy cow....I still can't believe it's actually going to happen. Geeze. In January it will be three years since we started dating. (yeah yeah, i dated while he was gone, i know, but hellloooo, i ended every one of them because of this guy who treats me like a queen). I'm so incredibly lucky.  I don't know why i've been so blessed. I've never been treated so well, with more love and respect than I could ever ask for.

sweaters, cell phones, and boys?...oh, boy. :)

It's been a little chiiiiiily! Today i about froze my fingers off waiting for the bus. :( but at least i get to wear cute sweaters! lol. This is one of my favorite sweaters lately and my fav jeans too....and of course, the phone. But HEY! bryce is moving out this WEEKEND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so goodbye cellphone! (well not really but now it won't be attached to my ear 24/7.

Logan

So, Logan is just about one of the prettiest places in Utah for sure. The mountains are amazing-pictures never do them justice. I love it because the campus is up on the hill so if you are on campus, and go to the south end (which is right where the art building is...) you can look over the entire city. It's amazing. I wish I had a panoramic lens or something for my camera so you could see the whole thing.
There's always this awesome mist, that i didn't get to get pics of, that starts at the base of the mountains and lessens as it goes up...looks so completly amazing against the blue mts. :) love it!!

So those pics are ones I took last week looking for a place to draw from. It's just across the street from the art building.

Mary Kay Beauty to the MAX!

Hehehe... I just wanted all y'all to see how BEAUtiful i look now that I use Mary Kay.... I'm sure this pic is just ENTICing you all to buy some..... ;)

Facial Mask....

Critique

So i have to say, about those last two projects, i was scared out of my mind for critique for each one. Especially for the charcoal drawing because it was for my drawing class, and though i love my professor, he's extremely harsh during critique and i thought i was going to puke up until he started commenting on it. He usually is critical about drawing strait from pictures but he said he wouldn't have even guessed i had done it from a picture and i "overcame" that. lol. Anyway, i was just so relieved that he was happy with it
For the other one, the painting, I wasn't nervous really for the actual critique because my Design professor always has something good to say. But the cool thing about that one was that after the class discussed it, i was allowed to say whatever i want or explain things or whatever, so I asked about a couple of things that i thought maybe i should have changed or done differently, and the only response i got was from my professor, she said, "Cherise, i think you already got your answer". It took me a second to realize she was pointing out that every comment that Had been made was that every part of it was successful. Holy cow..... I'm finally doing what I should be doing with my life.

Ok! it's finally done! :)

So I finished it late last night and turned it in today. We had critique and from everyone's comments, including my professor's, it sounds like they all liked it.

Again, please tell me what you think...honestly!

Ok, so it's still not done. don't think it is. These two are just to show my progress so far today. I have to finish is TONIGHT (eek!!) because it's due tomorrow. lol.


So I'll take another pic of it when i acutally finish it and before i turn it in. I'm really nervous about it. Like i said in my other post, I've never done anything near this large.

Drawing Final Project

So i'm still working on that last one. its not done yet but in the mean time i did this other final project for my drawing class. It's due on Thursday and i've been so wrapped up in the Design one, i didn't start this one til today. And i actually finished it all, all at once. I still don't have the final pic of it but i'll add it later.
So this is the pic i drew from. Its one i took in Europe also. love love love it. ....

This is it in progress. I just throw some newspaper down on the floor in front of the tv and i put on lord or the rings for its artistic qualities :) and started drawing....
This is it when it's close to being done but not quite, it still had some details to go....

And here we are!

Please tell me what you think.....

Final Project for Design

So for my final project for my design class i can do pretty much whatever i want. Hardly any limits. I won't go into detail about the few conditions because they aren't really important except that it has to be at least 18x24 inches.

I ended up chosing a photo i took in Paris of the river with the skyline etc. (as you can see below), i went, again, to Kinkos and blew it up in pieces and pieced the three together and graphed it out so i can transfer it easier to my board.





Now, my plan was to do this as a painting, 4 feet x 2 feet....but that presented money problems (a canvas that size costs around $60.) so instead i bought a $3 piece of Hardwood from Home Depot where they also cut it to size for me. Then i bought Gesso for $11 (like white paint-its almost like a primer but simply to prepare a surface to paint with acrylics on top of.

Then another $1 for a couple sponge brushes and an extra halloween plate for a palette and i'm all set! Its not the best pic ever, but that's a close up of it after the first coat. :) ..... aaaand, there's the whole thing-spread out in my living room, making everyone that comes in the house have to step around or over it. :) That's what they get for living with an art student... sorry! :) I have all my paints and brushes all piled into an old shoe box so i can take it wherever easily...


So, I got started on it at Jen's house over the weekend and then some more work on it today.... and this is where i am so far. Can't see much detail but, hey! you will when i'm done!!

Henri Rousseau Color study

So here's the last project I finished for my Design class. I was assigned an artist (Henri Rousseau) and had to choose one painting to repaint in different color schemes. The first pic, below, is a 4x4 inch square taken from an 8x10 print of one of Rousseau's paintings. So its only a portion of the actual painting.

So i had to use that to repaint the same thing in different color combinations. The first was Achromatic (black and white).
The next was Monochromatic (one color + black and white)

The Third was Analogous (two-three colors right next to eachother on the color wheel), yellow and orange, +black and white
The fourth was Complimentary (colors opposite eachother on the color wheel) orange and blue +black and white

The last one was called Discordant (colors you think will look awful together, or clash) yellow, green, purple, browns, and orange

Here they are all done and mounted together with Rousseau's original at the top.

Simulated Texture Self-Portrait

OK, so I'm in a 2-D Design class and we do a wide variety of projects. Some of them are actually really cool and turn out suprisingly well.

This one really suprised me. I had no idea what i was doing and was not into it at all at first. But once it started coming together, i got more excited about it and now the final product is actually framed. :)

So, it had to be a self-portrait, collage, using xeroxed textures, rubbings of textures, text used as texture, and hand drawn textures. Plus it had to "reveal" something about yourself. I love flowers so i did the entire thing of textures of flowers-real and fake.

There wasn't anyone around when i started so i had to take a pic of myself-

Then I took SeVERAL trips to Kinko's and spent at least a couple hours there getting different textures by pressing flowers and petals and stems and leaves on the glass and copying it and messing around with the value and intesity options.

Then i had to Map it out and kind of outline what i was going to do. Then i had to choose what textures i'd use for each part etc.

Then the cutting began....

This is my normally very clean room that ended up extremly messy. This isn't even the worst point. These pics i took standing on my bed and looking down (the top is on the right side of my bed and the pic below is on the left :)
Anyway, after what took about 15-20 hours of xeroxing, planning, cutting, pasting, moving around etc, this is what I got in the end.

Swing Dancing!

So i went dancing this last week and was contemplating how different my life is now from last year. I won't go into all the different things i thought of but one was simply that Country swing dancing is no longer 'my life'. it made me sad. I used to go two-three times every week and i'd stay for 2-3 hours each time i went.
Now that i'm up here though, i don't go nearly as often. Just once a week at the very most. Luckily i'm in a swing dance class and a ballroom class that each meet twice per week, but still. Anyway, i came across this pic of this lift i used to do all the time when i was in Salt Lake last year. It's a cool pic but let me just say, it's harder than it looks....

Long story that should have been a short one.... :)

Over Thanksgiving break, Bryce got to come and hang out with me for a week and it was simply Stupendous. :) I couldn't pick him up the day he flew in because i had to work that evening so his brother picked him up and brought him back down to Provo and they hung out. So the original plan was that i would get off work (friday night around ten) and go home, get some sleep and get up early the next morning and drive down and meet him, maybe around 10:30 or 11:00. But when i got off work i was too awake and too excited so i ran home packed up some stuff (all the while texting back and forth, telling him that i was getting ready for bed) and jumped in my car and headed down to stay with Jen and go get him a couple hours early in the morning.
THEN, half way there i realized i had tons of friends in Provo and West Jordan is so out of the way, it would just be extra driving. So i got ahold of my Brooke Tolman (st. louis friend) and she said i could stay with her. I even talked to bryce on the phone while i was driving for probably 30-40 mins and he never even had a clue that something was up (so so proud!!). So i stayed at Brooke's house, where we stayed up talking til four AM, lol. Then in the morning i texted Bryce some more saying, oh yeah, i'm just trying to get ready to leave....i slept in, i'll be there in a few hours etc...
I left her house around 9:30 and got to his brother's place maybe five mins later. lol. I texted him again and just said "so you want to go to breakfast?" "when?" he asked, "right now". lol, he called me and told me i was a turd and he came out and found me and it was completly friggin awesome.
Anyway, so the actual reason for this post is the pics below. On our way back to Logan after i picked him up (and went to an amazing breakfast with his brother and Amanda Frost), we stopped by to say hi to jana and jeff and congradulate Diana on her wedding at the Bountiful Temple. So that's where she took these couple of pics. Thanks Jana! :)

The Artsy part of me...

Here are a few of my favorite drawings from the last couple years. hey, while you're at it, check out my other blog--the link is on the left. ( www.artlarue.blogspot.com)

The guy i'm so in love with....

I always dreamed of a guy that would be "the perfect one" for me. One who would understand me and love me for me. When i met Bryce when i was 14, i never thought he'd be the center of my life a few years later.
Its been a few years coming (three actually....who's counting????) but we're finally just a couple weeks away from living in the same town.....probably would seem strange to alot of people that we've both been willing to do long distance for so long but we've been able to make it work and i'm so grateful because we're so close to having what everyone else usually has right away.
As crazy as people think i am ...or we are... i'm so grateful for what i've learned and what i've been able to feel and experience because of our situation. I've learned to really Communicate and work things out. I've learned to love like i never knew how to before.