Places

What was really striking about this area is the combination of ancient/historical buildings and tall industrial-looking skyscrapers. While some places have either one or the other, this scene outside the museum really shows off both types of architecture. I decided to use a green charcoal block with my water pen because many buildings here have tinted green windows. For this study, I wanted to capture the "scene" of the place. I focused less on specific architecture and more on overall composition, shapes, and shadows. I tried to preserve the white of the page for the highlights on the water and tried to push value to add depth; however, I struggled to build this up enough over my 30-minute stay. 

Although cold, the weather aches for spring. The sun glistened off the water, trees are beginning to brighten, and many people were walking along the pond. 

Coming up on completing my second week in Korea, I have felt a little overwhelmed trying to learn about and understand Korean culture. Seeing history blend in with modernity is something I haven't experienced before. Sitting here and taking time to paint has helped me reflect on what I've learned in the museum and take in the uniqueness of this scenery.

I don't know why, but while painting I had a realization that I'm reaching the end of my time in Korea. It is a really weird feeling. I really miss home but I've also really come to love Korea. It does feel sort of isolating to speak a different language but I've also been having a lot of fun exploring new places, eating delicious food, and meeting new people. It's complicated, I don't know. 

I was also thinking about how much time I've had to practice art. I'm sort of teary-eyed as I think about this. Like many of the artists I've talked to, art is so important for healing and reflection. Becuase of this project, I've had a concrete excuse to go out and spend large amounts of time sitting outside. I never do this in school. Sure, recently I've made an effort to take classes at ASLD; however, I don't really go outside when I'm in school. I get so bogged down with classes, assignments, and work that I follow all of those things blindly. I feel like I've talked about this before, but it's true. But it's challenging to find a balance. I figure I'm in school for a short period of time and I might as well take advantage and try my best to do well. However, I think I also accidentally sacrifice my own mental health for it. I've found that classes at ASLD have helped me a lot. I also find that spending more time outside also really helps me. When I get back home I'd like to make time to do plein air painting.

This has been such a unique experience for me to exist as an art-student for a semester and I'm loving it.

Similar to the previous painting, I was really drawn to this place because of the clashing of time periods: temple grounds nestled within skyscrapers. However, for this picture I wanted to focus more on the physical architecture and composition. I chose to do this because I liked how the roofs of the buildings in the foreground had a linear pattern whereas the newer building in the background was more faceted. While both structures share similar components like slightly curved forms, they remain stylistically--and historically--different.

Although this picture does not catch this, the light changed over the course I was sitting outside. This created really beautiful patterns of light both on the rooftop as well as the glass skyscraper. Birds also chirped against the backdrop of cars. In the middle of a city, this place was nearly deserted when I spent time there.

So obviously this picture looks unfinished--because it is. 

I have really tried to educate myself before coming to/while staying in Korea about rules and regulations and general things I should or shouldn't do. If there's a sign I take the time to read it and follow it. At this palace, I read the rules and regulations and I didn't read anything about no painting. After this experience, I checked online to see if there was anything there about no painting and I didn't find anything. I actually found a YoutTube video showing a girl painting in one of the palaces. So I'm not really sure why I was told to stop. While I was painting, a staff member came up to me and told me "No watercolor" so I apologized, said I didn't know, and packed up my painting. I could have maybe stayed to draw on details but he was staring at me and hovering around me after I packed up and was waiting for my picture to dry. I decided to just leave because I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. I chose not to finish this picture because I am very adamant about these pictures being live studies; finishing this picture back at my dorm would defeat the purpose of a live study. Additionally, I think this is a good way to see my midpoint stage when I'm painting.

While this would make sense to be the first place to draw, the number of people made it difficult for me. I hate drawing/painting in front of people. I drew this area around 6 pm and was basically rushing to draw before the sun set. During this time there weren't a lot of people walking around and I found a spot I could isolate myself in. Yonsei's campus is beautiful even in the deadness of winter. The architecture of the buildings--as one of my classmates stated--looks something out of a Harry Potter movie. The foliage still has muted tones so I am really looking forward to when spring comes along. For this reason, I decided to use color to see how maybe my palette will change when I paint this scene again later on. I tried to capture the muted tones while making this painting. During this process, I was also reflecting on a documentary I just watched about Korean students. This documentary talked about how Koreans pushed themselves to build themselves up as a nation but now many highly educated students--despite their hard work and knowledge--are struggling to find work. 

I painted this morning (Saturday) and it was actually very relaxing--I'm glad painting gave me an excuse to sit outside and hang out. I decided to take a different approach to this painting than I normally take. First, I didn't sketch out the scene beforehand. In every other painting I've done, I sketch out what I'm looking at with pencil before switching over to painting. However, for this landscape, I only used watercolor the whole time. This is a little hard to do with watercolor because if you mess up the original painted sketch, you can't erase it and you can't cover it up. This forced me to be really conscious about the sketch I painted. The other thing I wanted to do was to not use any pen after painting. I know I did this in the last painting of this place, but I treated this first picture more like a sketch than an actual picture (I'll explain this more below in my overall reflection of this place). A lot of times I rely too heavily on using pen to help define my picture more but I wanted to try to make my picture more clear when only using watercolor.

In the middle of my painting, it--funny enough--started raining. So for about half the picture, I was painting with one hand and holding up an umbrella with the other. This actually I think helped me be a little more abstract with my lines (which is something I struggle with) so this actually wasn't a bad thing.

Another random but interesting thing that happened was a man and woman approached me asking me to take a picture of them. The man graduated from Yonsei 50 years ago. I can't really wrap my head around how long 50 years is and what it would feel like to visit a place 50 years after leaving.

I only had one class today so I had extra time to work on this picture. I really liked the shadows outside and their bluish tint, so I decided to work with watercolors. I worked on this while the sun was setting and listening to my discover weekly playlist. Around halfway through the painting, I felt like I had sort of a rush of endorphins. The last time I had this same feeling was when I spent a day in France--also listening to my discover weekly playlist--climbing the rocks on the coast and looking at a bunch of sea creatures during low tide. I think the rush I was getting was based on a feeling of exploration. As an engineering student, I feel like I have been deprived of this day-to-day. I get sucked into this tunnel of thinking about everything I have to turn in and am scared about doing poorly on assignments. Failure is looked down upon in school. I applied this same mindset to my art for a very long time. Before this journey I've taken with my practicum, the only other time I "let go" in my art was when I got *extremely* sick in New Zealand and couldn't think straight. Now, as a healthier approach, I find myself sticking closer to the idea of studying rather than perfecting. With this mindset, I don't feel destroyed after making something that doesn't look "good." Instead, I focus on what I want to capture and the form I want to present on a page. Completely alone poking snails or mixing colors, I can enjoy the little things that are many times overlooked. But these are the moments I remember.

I also think back to Helen sharing her experience of healing using calligraphy and stone carving. I find studying people and places to be honestly pretty meditative. By focusing on color and replication, the repetition found within the process of drawing or painting is really cathartic. I really like this experience of giving myself the space and time to observe nature and sit in the sunlight. Even with just spending two weeks here, I've noticed I haven't really gotten headaches or stomach aches. As a comparison, when I was home I got daily headaches and a number of stomach pains every week. Maybe the food is healthier for me here, but maybe this process has helped ease a lot of anxiety I hold onto back home.

By coincidence, I painted this picture exactly 5 weeks after the first picture I made from my dorm window. Today had been raining the whole day and I really appreciate how quiet and calm everything feels with this weather. To match how I was feeling, I decided I wanted to stick to more neutral colors compared to last time. Additionally, I thought shortening my color range could allow me to focus more on value and develop more depth. I think this picture has slightly more depth than my previous attempt, but I definitely could've darkened more areas. I didn't do this because I also didn't want to overwork my paper and cause it to pill. Last time I also didn't like how much I drew onto the picture after painting, so I tried to hold myself back this time. However, by doing this, I realized there are more places where I should've built up my darks more. I relied more on measuring this time around and can see improvement in my proportions.

Like many of my other pictures, I chose this location because I liked the juxtaposition of city with nature. I didn't show this in the pictures, but there were many people walking around during this time (I painted 5:30 - 6:30 pm). I sat in sort of an awkward area--somewhere I could both get a view that I think would make a good composition as well as somewhere I could sort of shield myself. When I first got here, I was really struggling to find somewhere to paint/draw. In a city, there are--obviously--a ton of people. I was too scared to make something where people could see what I was doing. It makes me very uncomfortable to make something in front of other people. I tend to be a pretty anxious person and feel like everyone can see what I see is wrong with my work. I think this is why it's taken me 21 years before I started plein-art-type paintings. I fear judgment from others, and I think my own judgment intensifies this feeling. However interestingly enough (after about 15 minutes of painting) I felt relatively comfortable here; no one cared what I was doing. 

As a side note, when I was sketching at Deoksugung Palace I was approached by a group of men with cameras. They wanted to (respectfully)  take pictures of me (??) with the palace in the background. I read some stuff online before coming here that this can happen with white foreigners traveling to Asia so I wasn't entirely surprised (but I was still confused with the whole situation). Anyway, long story short, I think they liked the texture of my hair with the architecture of the palace/pottery. So, to avoid this same experience at this new public location, I put my hair into a bun, wore a face mask, and sat in a small corner. I wanted to explain this whole story because I was thinking about facemasks while painting at this location. During COVID, I actually had much more confidence. When I cover my face, I weirdly feel like I have more confidence. At a predominately male engineering school, covering my face felt like I could be seen more as an equal as well as being able to hide in the crowd when I wanted to. Yes, people could make assumptions about me based on what I wore but they weren't able to "read me" because my face was obscured. I liked this feeling of security; when it came down to it, I could be in charge of whether I wanted to look intimidating enough to seem not approachable or I wanted to look friendly enough to approach someone. I like(d) the feeling (whether it be true or fabricated) of having security.

In terms of my actual painting, I chose a difficult perspective but worked hard to simplify what I was looking at. Depth in my pictures is definitely something I'm still trying to master. I think my color pallet was relatively successful with the cooler tones, however, I think the foreground bushes should have been cooled down slightly (they're a little too warm with the cadmium yellow). I wasn't really sure how to approach the tree with all the branches; there were a bunch of dead leaves at the top and many bare branches. This forced me to way overgeneralize what I was seeing and I think made this part of the painting look sort of confused. I'm looking forward to reattempting this in the future and seeing how this scene changes in the spring.

I was painting in my little corner again and was approached three times while trying to paint. They were all really weird experiences that sort of distracted me while painting and made me a little uncomfortable but I don't really want to reflect on that here. And honestly, these weird situations required a lot of talking that took away from my reflecting time. Because of this, I don't have as much to write about what I was thinking.

In terms of revisiting the area, I was really surprised that the tree I saw before without leaves ended up have deep red/green leaves. It was really pretty and I honestly don't think I would've noticed it in another context (ie not revisiting or sitting here). 

I was debating even adding this picture to this page. I chose this location because I wanted more practice with painting/drawing trees. Because I put all of my focus into the trees, I forgot to prime the paper with a light watercolor wash. I also directly painted the trees instead of building from the background. When I first started painting the brown color, I realized my mistake; the paint didn't lay down correctly. After realizing this I debating just abandoning the picture and going to another location but I decided to stay. I thought "how much worse can it get" and I just kept painting and drawing in details. Ingnoring the rest of my painting, I am happy with the trunks of my trees. I found that by layering different shades of brown and creating crevices and knots with marker that I was able to create a texture I liked. This was a good reminder to *always prime your paper*.

So what's a little funny is that when I returned to this place, I was wondering if I was in the right location. I entered through the same way I entered before but it looked very different than when I visited this place in March. There was *so* much greenery--trees and bushes flooded the gates surrounding this burial grounds. 

I chose a slightly different perspective than the last time I came to this place to paint. I liked the curved trees but I also like the hanok architecture so I wanted to include the building as well. Because it was a more challenging perspective, I wanted to do a monochrome painting so I can focus on value rather than color. The other challenge was that I didn't have a spare piece of paper to test the color on before painting so I had to be extra mindful not to paint too dark by accident. 

With this attempt of having a tree in frame, I made sure to prime my paper beforehand. I got some new--fancier paper--from Hongdae that I used for this picture (more textured than other paper I was using). I painted this in the morning before my classes and before anyone else made it out to the rooftop garden on top of the library on campus; it was actually really relaxing. I've been a little stressed out recently with all the things I need to get done and this was a nice break. This area had a really beautiful view of mountains and buildings in the distance and the trees and plants on top of the roof are starting to come back to life from the winter. I tried to add warmer colors into my painting to depict that (cad yellow, etc). I tried a similar approach to making the tree similar to how I did the last painting; however, I was still a little lost on doing the green spindles growing out of the tree. In an attempt to not overwhelm the picture with pen, I tried to make a bunch of airy (?) loops with lines coming out of them to represent spindles. I also didn't add as much greenery to the trees to not overwhelm the picture (I feel like this would have caused a lot of details to get lost) but I think I could've added in a few more branches. I also wish I brought my grey pen to use instead of my black pen; I think the black pen is too hard for the painted colored range in this picture.

Over the course of this assignment, I feel like I am gradually able to handle simplifying scenes more. I typically stayed away from landscapes and painting in the past because I got overwhelmed with everything I was looking at and I had trouble developing a color palette, respectively. I'm typically uncomfortable idea with not making something "good," but this assignment has sort of pushed me out of this needing to be "good" mindset. Instead, I know that I just need to make pictures of different scenes and reflect on them. I feel like I haven't had many--if any--opportunities to do this in college, in high school, and honestly middle and elementary school. I feel like there has also been pressure on me to perform and when I couldn't live up to whatever standard I or others set for myself, it felt like I just "wasn't good at it" or the time I put towards it was a waste of time. It feels weirdly comforting with this project that I can create, reflect, and re-attempt. I think this reflective process has helped me focus on what I want to work on next time instead of feeling incompetent. This honestly wasn't the intention I had for my practicum at the beginning but is something I'm actually really grateful for at the moment. I find myself rereading my past entries and appreciating how far I've come since I started this project in terms of artistic ability, experiences, and reflection. I am incredibly appreciative of all the support I've gotten for this project.

Like a few of my other pictures, I chose a different perspective for my landscape painting. I think this is ok, because it shows how I choose compositions change over time. Whereas I just chose a location that looked nice before, I now think more about what scene would make for a better picture. I definitely need to improve my composition-choosing skills, but I also think I am gradually getting better.

I liked this view because it shows the rolling mountains that are here in Seoul. A lot of times I feel like I forget that there are mountains here; there are so many tall buildings and people that distract me from my surroundings some of the time. Honestly, the first time I painted in this location, I didn't even notice these mountains in the background. The only reason I noticed is because I revistited this place and the table I sat at before was gone. In looking around to choose a new perspective, I looked back and noticed this area.

I think the mountain in the background on the right side is correct; however, the larger mountain in the back on the left side should be *slightly* more saturated with color.

As my last drawing was at the lake, I thought--given the opportunity--it would be really cool to draw from the 123rd floor. I have never drawn this high up before. Taking time to draw here made me more aware of details within the  landscape. It was interesting to see how most shadows and colors all blended into one another. 

There was also really bad pollution so the scenery wasn't very clear. Air quality isn't great out here--I've realized how lucky I am to live in Colorado. Back home, I take clear views and clean air for granted. It's good to have experiences like this to reflect on what I am (or should be) thankful for.

I felt some mixed emotions while finishing this last picture--this is the last picture I had to complete to finish my practicum. It was a weird feeling to complete this picture. The first picture I did alone towards the beginning of my trip, but this one I did right before I left Korea with my mom. 

I'm glad I was able to return to this place. It was smoggy and cloudy the first time I came but it was a beautiful and clear day today. Because this view is visible from inside a restaurant, I opted to stick with pencil instead of water color (which I would have preferred to use). 

This picture is definitely an improvement when compared to my other landscape pictures. I did have to sketch it beforehand with a pencil because the perspective was difficult. Additionally, I did feel like I got a little confused with some of the shadow shapes of the bushes and struggled to make the road look like it's receding in the distance (there is a big hill). Where I thought to lighten the end of the road, I think this ended up bringing it "closer" where I should have made it darker to push it back.

However, as a whole, I think I'm starting to get the hang of painting and figuring out how to make a general landscape painting. The picture looks more complete than other pictures I've made--there are minimal unintentional white spaces and no part of the image looks significantly out of place.

I almost didn't go outside to do this landscape today because I am studying for midterms and am pretty stressed out about them, I haven't left Yonsei's campus for about 5 days. In taking classes that aren't STEM, I feel like I've had to find a completely different way to study the material. *Especially* considering I can't look up videos/online resources to help me because some of the classes are very unique (i.e. Korean Art History, and Korean Wave and Popular Culture). Talking with Joey though made me get myself together to go outside. We both miss each other and as a result, forget to take care of ourselves a little bit. After talking to him, I made myself go outside to do this picture and, honestly, I feel a lot better now after sitting outside for 1.5 hours.

As all my other pictures are done at least 4 weeks apart, I wanted to do a pair that were done closer together (time-wise). I also wanted to be able to paint this spot again before the flowers died (it's *very* pretty right now).

I tried to use gouache paint this time because I haven't used it here in Korea. Today is a bright and sunny day so it was a bit of a challenge. Like I learned in Andrea's class in France, I can't let the gouache paint dry or else it will only paint as watercolor. With the weather, I had to constantly spritz my paint and work fairly quickly to prevent the paint from drying.

I think this picture sort of looks like I don't know what I'm doing--its a combination of strong use of gouache (bright, clear colors) and weak use (water-color-type colors in the background).

I also forgot the lamp post in the background...and I only realized this when I saw it in my other picture.

However, I think my perspective changed in this one as it looks like the road is curving down (part of a hill) whereas the previous attempt looks like a flat road.