domingo, 20 de septiembre de 2009

Animation Mentor is about to start!

After all this time, Animation Mentor is here! It has not been easy. I paid in August and they didn´t receive my payment, so I waited until they asked me for my receipt. I sent it, but they didn´t find my money anyway. And finally, looking into my account again, I found out that the money was back into my account! But 162€ seemed to get lost during that period and I don´t think I will recover them.

I don´t know if it is Animation Mentor's fault, because they changed the account number and they didn´t let me know about that change; maybe they told me and it was my fault because I didn´t find the information about the new account number anywhere; maybe it was the bank's fault, because as soon as they see some money passing by, they take some of it for themselves; maybe it is nobody's fault and it is only that the dollar costs more now. No idea. But I have lost a lot of money, and I am not happy with that.

Anyway. My boyfriend (thanks a lot, darling) made the transfer again (I couldn´t do it without the online banking that I still don´t have) and this time it worked! So I am going to start Animation Mentor. That MAKES me happy, so let's look at the brighter side of our lives. :)

Life drawing classes

The other day I was told that there were life drawing classes not far from the company. Some colleagues were going to take them, so I immediately decided I would go as well.

I only took life drawing classes once in my life. It was for a period of 15 days in Gijón, in a summer course that I enjoyed a lot. In that case, the model was a quite handsome man who posed for us for one and a half hours every time. It must have been terrible for him to keep the same pose for such a long time (with little breaks inbetween).

This time the model was a young woman, quite thin and with very english facial features.

It is nice to go to life drawing classes. When you see the model naked, you don´t see a person naked; you see a potencial piece of art in your empty paper. It is a very nice feeling. I don´t know about the rest of the people, but when I saw her, all I could see was light, shadows and shapes. The room was in complete silence while everybody was drawing her. The concentration was amazing, I loved that. You could hear the sound of pencil, the more agressive sound of charcoal, an esporadic rubber somewhere, a chair changing place to get a better point of view... I loved those little sounds. I loved silence. I loved the concentration. It was like being for two hours in another world. The cost of this trip was 5 pounds.

In this occasion, the poses changed. At the beginning, they changed every three minutes. There was a man there, drawing as well, who told the woman "ok, it is fine" when the time had past. Probably it was this man who decided to practise life drawing and decided to let other people participate to help with the payment due to the model. That is not a bad idea at all.

As I said, the poses changed every three minutes at the beginning, every ten or so later, and the final pose lasted for twenty minutes. So you could practise everything: with the shortest ones, capturing the pose and line of action; with the longest, pose, light and shadows and even the relationship with the environment.

I would upload the drawings I did, but I don´t have any scanner. So that will be another time.

The bad news is that these classes will last only for another week more. Then, they will be interrupted because they have to look for another place: the big room they were using is going to be engaged for something else. What a pity!