Catching up and progress

Greetings and Saludos, 
Keeping this short so I can hit some First Friday funtivities this rainy evening. 
I survived my first week of online graduate school! Above is the second in my residency series and I'm really happy with how she's coming along. Everything seems to be settling in nicely lately. I panicked a bit early on when I started changing my mind about a lot of my ideas for this particular piece. I think it might have something to do with Arts Administration taking up my brainspace more and my artwork taking a bit of a back seat. For this Atabeira piece I had a lot of ambitious and somewhat silly ideas. The box head was something I begrudingly scrapped. Lesson: Sometimes things have to exist as sketches. This method of representation is much more solid. I started stitching the patterns for her face (see previous posts/tags for more info). As the stitches come around the back of the head they turn into the pattern of my fingerprint. I like that it's sort of subtle and has other references (the halo, the stitching on the face etc) and I'm really excited to see how it all comes together. A little sad to see the box go. 
The box just looked so odd and it took away from the softness of the material. It was too much of a jarring juxtaposition (good band name right there...you're welcome).

​I'm feeling more at ease and in tune with my ideas lately. I have a better schedule and am sleeping like a normal person. I finalized details for my vejigante class and have also had some really meaningful interactions with peers both at Millersville and in my grad program. I wish someone had told me that making friends out of college can be incredibly difficult. Because it is. I'm already a fairly introverted person so to add the fact that making friends post college literally means you have to go out of your way to make friends. This residency has helped me engage my peers and value the fact that this is a unique opportunity where I can more easily (and hopefully this will be true) make some meaningful friendships. 
I started making a more personal (can you believe it!) component for my series. It's a photo album so far and here are a few pages from it. I'm doing a lot of mixed media type work so these are Van Dykes. 
Until next time! Ciao!