Bamboo Drawing Sticks of Doom

Wednesdays are now classified in my head as drawing boot camp days. I woke up at 7:30 and had a hazelnut yogurt for breakfast (trying some new yogurt varieties!), and then headed off to Brunella the internship woman's studio at 9:30, stopping briefly at Conad to buy a portable salad for lunch later. At the internship I continued working on the picture book, this time moving on from thumbnail drawings and onto what is called a "dummy book", which is a bunch of pieces of paper stuck together to show what the final book will look like. At this point in time though I think I can safely cross off "children's book illustrator/author" from my list of potential future careers (I'm not sure if it ever was on the list in the first place). In any case, Brunella also mentioned that there's a competition going on where you send in an illustration of a scene from a famous movie and you can have that illustration end up on a calendar, and that sounds interesting, so I might be doing that next week.

At 12:50 I left the studio and power walked to class, which is still on the other side of the city and takes way too long to get to. This time, though, instead of trying to get through all the tourists, I took an alternate route that used more side streets. I think that decreased my travelling time by a little less than 10 minutes, so I'll probably be going that way on future Wednesdays.

I got to class 5 minutes early and scarfed down the salad (it was a caprese salad, but there were only two baby tomatoes in the whole thing. peh.) and then class started. Today we started using ink, which would be all fine and dandy except that the pens we have to use are not actually traditional pens but are sharpened bamboo sticks. I am not sure if anyone reading this blog has had the pleasure of trying to draw with a sharpened stick dipped in ink, but I can tell you it is not a pleasure. It is the opposite of a pleasure. I don't know what the professor has against actual pens.

Class ended at 4 and I walked back to the apartment and made pasta with pesto sauce, tomatoes, and mozzarella for dinner. The pasta I was eating was hollow spaghetti, which is surprisingly hard to eat because you can't slurp it up, because it's hollow, and you can't easily scoop it, because it's spaghetti, so you have to turn your head sideways a bit and really use your facial muscles. Tasted good though.

Following dinner I finished a book and then did my very best to not take a nap. I think I scared my roommate a bit when she walked in and I bolted awake and said "I'm not sleeping" really suddenly. But I managed to get up on time to go back to SACI for open drawing, in which we had to draw rib cages. Rib cages are annoying because it's hard to keep track of all the ribs and make sure you've got the right number there. I tried numbering them on the paper, but then it started turning into a rib cage optical illusion because the end of one rib becomes the outline for another. I finished at around 9:30 and then walked back to the apartment, and here I am now.