Kincaid – Week Three Recap

This week, I made an outline for the story about Arlys. I spent about two hours at the Washington Public Library working on it each morning. I went through my list of highlights, copied-and-pasted the sections of each transcription I wanted into a new document, edited them, and sorted them into five chapters and an introduction. I’m anticipating that each chapter will be between five and ten pages, if not more (the introduction’s only three), which may take me a while. I’m hoping to get at least three chapters done, because expecting to finish it before the end of the quarter is a little ambitious.

In the afternoons, I either went to Washington Community Arts Studio (WCAS) or Lion’s Lake Park in Washington. I have a time slot at WCAS on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays. When I was there, I made basic character sketches of Arlys and her husband John at different ages. They’ll be good as references, but they were also helpful to get my thoughts sorted out and visualized. They were done straight from my head, so that’s why they’re a bit messy. I attached a couple of them down below. Today, I drafted the introduction while I was there (and got to use the stencil!).

When I was at Lion’s Lake, I spent time doing live sketches of things in nature. I used pencil, watercolors, and ink pens. The pencil was for sketching, the watercolors for blocking in color, and the ink pens for detailing. I went through a bit of a learning curve with these sketches. The first two were incredibly frustrating because I wanted to get everything perfect, and I spent a lot of time agonizing over small details, proportions, and shades of color. I wasn’t very satisfied with those pieces. On the third day, I realized that focusing on overall shapes and values would be a much better use of my time. Instead of scrutinizing the scene I wanted to draw, I squinted my eyes and tried to get a general idea of the scene. Drawings became much more fun after that, and I was much more pleased with how they looked.

I had a lot more time for poetry this week, which I really enjoyed. I went further in the Kay Ryan book, and started on Shakespeare’s Sonnets this morning. I’ve been trying to memorize “How Birds Sing” from the Kay Ryan book, because even though it’s written in free verse, it has a lot of rhymes and slant rhymes, and it’s short. I think I’ve got the majority of it committed to memory now! I was feeling a bit intimidated by Shakespeare, so this poem was a good warm-up to that.

I wasn’t able to have an Arabic lesson last Saturday, but my next one will be tomorrow.