~.:JasmineTea:.~

Tests I took:

• English
• Japanese
• Science
• History

Compared to last year’s semester one report card, I have been able to improve. For example, I have gotten much better for my math. I still have areas to improve on and I would still have to continue working hard, however compared to last year, I have gotten better scores overall. Also, because I got fairly used to the speed of the IGCSE math last year, I think I have gotten quicker, giving more time for myself. This comes into all my subjects and so I would like to continue like this next semester as well.

Although this has always been a trouble for me, I think  I would have to try harder in joining in with class discussions. However, compared to last year or the year before, it was mentioned less on my report card. I would like to continue trying to join in and give my ideas.

For many of my classes, the Approaches to Learning section showed that I have high organizational skills, but an effective or average for all the other ones. I have a feeling that the Collaborative skills drop comes from me not joining in for the class discussions, so by overcoming that, I think I would be able to get better next semester.

My three goals had been:

• Understand how to do the redox questions in Chemistry
• Start understanding business, by the learning we do in Business Studies
• Be able to draw figures from any angle by the things I learn in Art

Because I tried to do Nielly Francoise’s style and failed to paint in that style many times, I am planning to not paint in her style. I looked at a couple of artists who paint in interesting styles, using many colors, and I found Corno.

She studied at the University of Quebec in Montreal, obtaining her BA in Fine Arts. She became a full time painter in her early 20s. Her paintings are displayed world-wide.

I had been looking for artists similar to Nielly Francoise, who I had talked about previously. I then found Corno, who paints portraits. I found her interesting at first because she uses many colors, and I found the way she paints her hair interesting. I then was attracted to the way she used color (example)

Although I can tell she uses a palette knife for painting, however since I do not have a large enough paper to work with, I am planning to only use the palette knife for the hair. I also noticed by using a dry brush, i could kind of copy the texture of her paintings, so i am planning on using that as much as possible.

Portraits

Chiaroscuro

Looking at my first charcoal figure drawings, I can see that I have improved a lot and got better at using charcoal through using it many times. At first, I had a very hard time adapting to the idea of filling in the volume of the figures when drawing. I basically just drew a silhouette of the person (seen in here),  or started with the outline of the figure and drew in (as seen in here). The silhouette was too dark to see how the figure was posing, and when drawing from the outline, there was not a large variation in tone.

After September 28th (here)(here), I started to ge used to filling in the volume and I could see the difference quite clearly. The figure’s pose could be seen, and the variation in tone suddenly increased by a lot.

As I got used to using the charcoal on its side, I could put in more detail. It got so much faster for me to finish a figure drawing by using it on the side because it would fill up a large space, and I could get the overall feeling of the figure before adding any shadows to make it a person. As I look at my most recent charcoal drawings, I know I have improved and have gotten better.

I have a reflection video as well:

Charcoal Figure Drawing Reflection from Jasminetea14 on Vimeo.

We started using charcoal as our media from this week. Instead of creating an outline and shading it in, we tried to fill in the volume of the figure at the beginning.

We used color charcoal for this lesson. We had to choose a light color and a dark color in the same family. I chose green as a color.

We then went back to filling the volume of the figure in with normal charcoal.

Le National