I'm taking advantage of a rare lull in the activity here to give my blog some much-needed attention. I finished up my classes at around 6 this afternoon, and I have spent the entire evening doing everything non-school related. All right, I did cheat and do some reading for my seminar class (an essay called Think/Classify by Georges Perec - I am supposed to be reading another book by Perec for a book club this weekend, but thats doubtful), but for the most part its been an evening of homemade fajitas, tv, laundry, and a cold Killians Irish Red.

I've been working on lots of interesting stuff lately. Mixing neutral primary, secondary, and tertiary colors with gouache and then matching them on my inkjet printer - I am a co-owner of a fancy new wide format Canon printer that uses a cool eight-ink system. Designing a book cover for a fictional Department of Labor document. Creating a photographic tour of my studio (which is up on flickr, in rough form). 10 1x2 inch slides with compositions inspired from the movie Il Conformista.

Just this morning I finished a project known across campus as The 500 - 500 one-inch thumbnail sketches in a week, all based on a small wooden cube and an s-hook, rendered in black ink. Once my camera is charged back up, I definitely want to document that one - its truly an exercise in process and pushing past creative block, especially when you get to your 200th drawing and think you have no more ideas left.

I'm very rarely away from my work these days. I'm in studio or class by 8:30, and I mostly get home after midnight, even on weekends. I have dreams of typography, of the 500, and of concept sketches for Form+Communication assignments. In addition to my studio at RISD, I have a tabletop photography setup in my basement, and anything in between is fair game when it comes to photography projects. (Just the other night I had Adam working as my assistant as I tried to photograph water beading up on my car's windshield.) My main academic building has an art supply store, a commissary (like Entropy @ CMU), and a coffee shop all on the main floor, which means I don't really ever have to leave it!

This morning I went to a lecture on freelance writing and the design media. I was interested in it primarily because Grace Bonney - she's the force behind design*sponge, in addition to doing freelance design writing for magazines - was on the panel. I sat in the back finishing my 500, but enjoyed it nonetheless.