Making the grade

I just got back from picking up my second portfolio. By 8AM, after a long night of coding, my eyes were tired but the sun was up, so I decided to put my shoes back on and go grab it. I got the other yesterday afternoon, just a couple of hours before this one was ready, but by the time I got home to the email telling me it was there, it was almost ten at night & not a good time to go to school to pick up a portfolio. Anyway, I’ve got both back now and I have both my grades back.

Both are A’s.

Excellent. I couldn’t have asked for better. I couldn’t have gotten better by working harder. I am fairly satisfied with the level of work/effort I put into my Drawing class, and very satisfied with the work and effort I put into and results I got out of my 2D Design class.

My actual Drawing grade was A-. I got an A on the final project, and would have got an A+ on it if I had done more “in-class participation”, which I guess means letting the teacher tell me to stop trying to be creative on my own terms.

There was a sketchbook in which we were told to make perspective sketches for about 15 minutes a day, several weeks into class. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was on track for the time he said we should put into it, less than 1/4 of the way through the 100 page sketchbook, when he said he expected them to be filled by the end of class. I was not the only person in class suprised and shocked by this information. I was probably not the only one who received a C for their Notebook grade re: not being full enough. I know I was doing the right sketches on a page by page basis; he kept passing it around as an example to the other students every time he looked at their progress. I guess I just didn’t do enough of it. Another 20 or 40 hours sketching in that book and I could have got an A on the notebook… and .. uhh.. still got an A in the class.

The only feedback I have on my 2D Design grade besides the grade itself is the same thign I heard last time; I don’t do enough ‘outside research’. Or if I do, I don’t document it properly. I have excuses I can give, and they’re reasonable. Most of what I want to know about things (like how far a body falling from a ten story building falls in 1/12 of a second during the last three or four twelfths of a second, or how to convert from 1:10 scale to 1:16 scale in one conversion step) I can work out in my head or with just a few quick notes on paper, and most general information is stored somewhere in my annoyingly encyclopedic brain. When I do end up looking something up online, or researching it in another way, it is usually fairly difficult to explain what I’m trying to figure out or why I think it’s relevent to the task at hand. I’ve tried. My mind just … looks in strange ways at and for information. Most people tell me, when they hear the explanations behind how I came to my idea for a painting, or all the math I did to get the color and the shape, or whatever else went through my mind, people tell me I’m strange. Anyway, not much in the way of ‘research’ ended up in my notebook, though A-grade projects came out of the ideas I had.

I’m getting pretty tired. I probably won’t write reviews for Star Trek: Nemesis or Maid in Manhattan or The Hot Chick right now. Just sleep, instead. I’m apporaching twenty hours up again, which I consider too many for the five hours sleep I got. Or maybe I’m just out of practise.

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Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

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