Kincaid – Week Five Recap

I had a lot of fun this week. I spent Monday in the library and in the studio. On Tuesday, the highlight of my day was going to the Botanical Gardens, which I’ll talk more about later. Wednesday morning, I went to downtown Washington. Yesterday morning, I practiced anatomy at home. Today, I went to downtown Washington again and spent the afternoon in the studio. The week started out a bit rough, but it got so much easier as it went on. I felt a lot of things click with me, whether it was painting, writing, or drawing. I’m not usually this lucky, so I’m trying to remember how I felt this week.

I finished illustrating 5 pages from the first chapter this week, and I attached a couple down below. They’re not finished (or aesthetically pleasing), but it’s normal for first drafts to not be fully realized. I’ve been trying to use a little reference as I can, so I’ve been guessing what something looks like most of the time. I also haven’t added speech bubbles yet, because I wanted to try a new technique where I cut them out of paper and stick them in the panels instead of drawing them in. I’ll add them later when I’m cleaning up the pages. Also, I won’t be able to get past the first chapter before the quarter ends, because this process has been taking a lot longer than I anticipated, unfortunately. In spite of that, I’ve been enjoying working on this project.

When I was live sketching this week, I tried to improve my framing and composition. I would practice that by taking a picture of the scene I wanted to paint and trying to copy the composition (once I had mapped that out, I stopped using the picture). I also tried to improve my color choices, but that was more of a side quest. None of the things I made were masterpieces, but my skills got a lot stronger. At the Botanical Gardens, there are currently a bunch of origami statues scattered around, which were very fun to draw. There were two paper boat statues cleverly placed floating on a lake in the Japanese garden, so I had to draw them. I also sat down near the koi pond and tried to paint an azalea bush and the koi themselves, which were difficult because they kept moving. Once I was done there, I spent some time in the Chinese garden too.

I finished memorizing Sonnet 81 this week, and I’m going to pick another sonnet to memorize next week. I also finished Selected Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, and I started Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. (To be clear: Good Poems is a compilation of poems by several people, not a book of poems written by Garrison Keillor.) I’ve spent more time writing this week, which has been really good.

In Arabic, I’ve started to memorize a new set of vocabulary words. There are also Arabic poems in my textbook, so Mrs. Hassan and I have been reading them aloud. They’re very abstract, which makes them hard to translate, but they sound lovely. I’ve kept practicing verb conjugation, which has been helping a lot.