I'm not sure what....

is wrong with people.  We just finished week 5 of school.  I actually had an instructor open last module back up for comment (we did a California poster), because only one person critiqued anyone's work.

Can you guess who that person was?  It was me. Of course.

As much as I hate critiques, I understand they are a part of the learning process and it allows us to practice our art criticism skills as well as teaching us to accept criticism.

It is the end of the following module, giving an extra week for critiques of the California posters.  I am still the only person who has critiqued anything.

Here is the poster I submitted.  The goal was to create some sort of informational poster representing California to the world for the period right around the Great Depression (I sort of crammed this in to an all nighter last weekend after Justin's grandparents' 50th anniversary party - poor time management on my part)

If this lack of participation was just in 1 class, I'd think it were a fluke. But it's not.  It's happening in ALL of my online classes.  And normally the instructors are harping on critiques by the 2nd or 3rd week.

Not a word has been said.

In a way it's frustrating because there are a lot of "oooh, I like that" or "ooh that looks really good" going around, but never anything concrete.  In fact, most of the time only a handful of people will have any comments on their work (the aforementioned comments included).

I've not received a single critique from a student so far this semester.  For the campus based classes, we don't crit every week.  In fact, last semester, we only did crits at mid semester and finals.  Class would take forever if we were doing the number of crits expected.

And when did people stop learning how to write a coherent thought?  It just feels like students are LAZY these days.  This school is not cheap.  I bust my butt (and Justin did too) to make the most out of a very expensive situation, but it makes it hard to take seriously when the other students are always just like "DERP".

Anyway, enough about that.

On to some assignments.

In class work over 2 weeks

In class work over 2 weeks

In class work over 2 weeks 

In class work over 2 weeks

Homework - basic foot shape study

Homework - Basic foot shape study

Homework - Basic foot shape study

Homework - Basic foot shape study

I've worked from the model we used previously.  I always would draw him too willowy and make him super elongated.  I was sort of doing the same here.  From the sides, I think I did pretty well with his proportions (I'd like to think I did a damn fine job on the knees).  looking at him head on, he just looks too narrow at the waist.  Unfortunately, we're tearing this one down on Thursday and staring anew.

I didn't do any artwork for my California Art class this week.  Instead our assignment was to write a "virtual tour" presentation teaching a specific audience about the Gold Rush or Native Basketry.

Here's my work from my graphic design class.  I swear to pete I hate cutting magazine paper or newsprint.  Worst task EVER.  Every time you think you've got the perfect piece picked out, the damn x-acto catches and crinkles or rips the paper.  Besides that, it's not like a lot of people have magazines or newspapers sitting around.  I most definitely am not going to go buy a bunch of magazines to cut up so I can have varying fonts (magazine layouts are pretty samey, so you need a variety of magazines to get a variety of text).

For a coming assignment, I've chosen to use the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund as my non-profit to create collateral for.  I think the work they are doing to help protect food freedom is really important.  So that will be an interesting assignment.  

I'm not sure if I'm getting better at tuning out the stupidity of my fellow students or if maybe they've quit being so obvious as I have no amusing stories to report this week.