Day one of classes is over and I think I am content with how things are going to turn out here. I’m kind of lucky because I am only taking two classes while I am over here, and both happen to be on Mondays and Wednesdays only, so I get early weekends and have Tuesdays and Thursdays to do whatever. Which is how I’ll manage to hopefully travel with the Travel Portfolio class on some of their excursions.
Lets start with Treasures of Provence, since that is my 0900 class. Aside from some technical problems the class went smoothly. Professor Gobel is a really nice guy and seems genuinely enthusiastic about what he is teaching. I’m a little disappointed just because it really doesn’t seem like we are traveling all that much, which is sort of understandable cause we have quite a few “travel class” and there is only so much budget. But still, we have 4 days where we end up not really having class. Odd, but it’s going to be something I have to accept none-the-less. We still go visit a lot of cool places.
We’ll be visiting the following:
Glanum and St. Remy
Casaneuve (a mosaic studio)
Abbaye de Senanque
Les Bories
And of course Angouleme (or Barcelona for all the non-SEQA students) and Paris.
Since I do have Tuesdays and Thursdays to myself, I’m going to try and just walk/bike around the countryside a bit, maybe travel to some of the other towns and explore. And I do think that there are planned trips for us sometimes on the weekends, so that will be fun.
My 1630 (4:30 pm for those of you not military time savvy) class, Visual Storytelling II, was also awesome. Unlike my 0900 we won't be traveling that much if at all in Vis II, but I'm starting work on what I hope to do for my Senior Project class, so I'm psyched about that. ( I'll tell you all about it after I have some art work to go with it.) It's going to be a bit of an unusual class since technically there is a student that is taking Vis I in it, so I have a feeling that there is going to be a lot of refresher information being throw at us. But honestly, it's been about a year and a half since I took Vis I, so I'm glad that all the information I learned is going to be talked about again.
Mostly the class consisted of power points and slide shows, which was cool, because I knew a lot of the artists/art on those slides, either from having read the books, or just having looked up the artists in the past. So I felt smart as we talked about it. Always a good feeling.
Other than that we didn't do much actual work. We have homework already. 12 thumbnails from the scripts that we wrote for the class due Wednesday. Which technically I had already written in Kneece's class last quarter, so all I had to do was make sure that I used specific ref for all the locations that could be found here.
I don't think working on these pages will be too hard, unlike the script I wrote for myself for my web comics class, I wrote this one in a plot format. Which btw, I love plot scripts so much. Even when I write for myself in full script format, by the time I get to drawing the pages, I've changed my mind about what exactly I want to have happen in each panel. So the plot format makes it so I can immediately decided what I want to happen as I go as I am sketching the thumbnails. And the character acting seem to be way less stiff when work this way. My pages sucked when I worked from full scripts that I had written.
A couple of the students were wandering around Lacoste a few days ago and discovered this tiny little village built into and on the wall of the path that leads to our “skype lab”. And today I got to go see it for myself, and as you can see I took some pictures. It has been dubbed it the “fairy village” (I should find out what that would be in French) and it’s quite a remarkable, cute little find. And I am sure that there will be a few sketches of it in a lot of us SEQA kids sketchbooks, along with doodles of the fairies that we have decided live there.
I guess that Jen asked Professor Gobel, our wonderful Treasures of Provence professor, if she could write one of her papers about it, and as a result he explained to her what it really was and where it came from. Apparently, the students at the Lacoste Art School that used to be here (before SCAD came in and decided that they wanted to buy it from them) started it years ago and had the school not been taken over, students from each preceding year were to add to the village. Which frankly I think is a really fun idea.
I’m curious if they would allow us to add to it, or if it’s something that they would rather let be as a way to remember the school that used to reside here.
While we are talking about somewhat magical little places that we’ve all discovered here, there is a garden, which we do have access to, that the locals and residents call the “Secret Garden”. It actually kind of hard to get into cause you have to stick your fingers between the door and the wall and unhook a latch on the inside before you can enter. And because it is still fairly chilly out and most of us are wearing gloves, it’s hard to actually manage to unhook the latch.
Anyway, there are these really cool huts made of vines that were sculptures that a visiting artist built. What’s cool is that these things were only supposed to last about 6 months, but as you can see from the photos there are still two standing (there were originally four, but they removed two of them.) Now I’m not entirely sure how long they have been here, but it’s definitely been longer than six months.
I can’t wait till we can sit in the garden (without worry of freezing our butts off in the snow) and draw, cause it has a really nice view. Though really, most places in the village do, but still, it’s a fun place to be. I assume there are flowers that will bloom when it starts getting warmer up there, considering garden is in the name. Maybe they actually have a veggi garden in there during the spring and summer. Who knows?
