Subscription to Level 1 Watercolour
I’ve subscribed to Level 1 Watercolour as my second course at OCA. I know that it will be difficult to find enough time to squeeze still more into my schedule. I don’t know, maybe it’s out of experience that under pressure, one tends to find very effective ways to manage time. The course has an estimated workload of 7 hours per week and I think that I will be able to spend 5 hours, so I shouldn’t be that much slower than expected. I was thinking about enrolling for months and am really looking forward to this course.
Organizing my studies
I think I will be able to start working on the Watercolour course in September, after materials have arrived. Probably it would also be better to fininsh the assignment of Part II for the Drawing course, before embarking on starting with the second course. There are also some organizational questions, for example on maintaining a learning log. Will I write two learning logs in parallel – integrate the watercolour blog into the drawing blog – or set up a new site? The main problem is in the additional activities like visits to museums or researching other artists’ works – I won’t be able to tell whether my reflections on other artists will be relevant for drawing or for watercolour. They’re just influences… Maybe I can tell later, when looking at a drawing or painting, that there were influences from a certain occasion or an artist whose work I have looked at. But in advance?
Therefore I thought it would be a good idea to restructure my blog to take up the material from the watercourse as well. This would also have the advantage that I wouldn’t have to double up my art research activities. I could tag research articles to indicate whether they are relevant for one or the other or both courses. But this approach would also require to restructure the navigation to allow tutors to access only what they’re interested in.
I’m also curious who will be my tutor for the watercolour course, if I will have two different tutors or stay with the same? Having a second source of feedback might be interesting, hopefully not resulting in contradictory advice! I’m really looking forward to the new course, because it’s one step further towards my main interest, painting. But there are still two more courses which I would love to do one day, these are sculpture and printmaking. I thought about doing them outside of the degree, without assessment. But currently, I can’t even think about that, taking my complete lack of free time into account. I will see when this might change.
Reflections on blogging
In the meantime, I decided to maintain a separate blog for the watercolour course, even if this means that I have to divide my research activities between the two courses. I think it is better to use separate blogs to avoid clutter, and it will also give me the opportunity of trying out a different approach to blogging. While I do like reflecting in the way I’m doing for this blog, I sometimes feel that it’s simply too much writing, and I’d prefer to draw more and write less. On the other hand, all the reflections I indeed undertake would be lost if I didn’t write them down in the blog. I wouldn’t be able to remember them after a week or so. Writing less would imply a different approach, more summarizing rather than describing like a protocol what I’m actually doing. With the second blog, I might try out a more summary approach and see which works better for me.
I also realized that I haven’t yet included tutor feedback on the first assignment and our intermediate correspondence. I’m afraid that I also haven’t followed the advice to look at other artists’ work in sufficient amount. But it’s really a time problem. Hopefully with continued work, I’ll develop the habit to reserve some regular time specifically for research.