Fruit Paintings

So, I finished my final written assigment. It was for East Asian studies, and the topic was comparing Northeast Asia (China, Korea, and Japan) with Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Brunei). This kind of went along with my criticism that the final exam was too focused on Southeast Asian nations, when they had only been covered in one of ten lessons, only four of them were expanded on, and none of them were included in the text. It was validating to see in the project description that further research would be required, as information would be required that was not covered in the lessons or the text. So how was I supposed to prepare for the final?

I did get my grade back for the final, and I will say that I did more than twice as well as I thought I would. But that's... still not good. I only need 2% on this final assignment to pass this course, and despite not doing well on the final, I am at least meeting the class average at this point in time.

Since the last written assignment was comparing the different Northeast Asian nations, about  half the research was already done. I just condensed the information in the previous assignment, focused on what unified them, and then compared them to Southeast Asia, which required new information.

Recently, I painted a bowl of fruit. I always looked down on people who did that. I was like, "Why would you paint a bowl of fruit when you could just take a photo and perfectly reproduce the image?" But my art course has really changed my perspective. One time I bought a painting because "It looks crude compared to the others, but it's my favourite for some reason". It's interesting to revisit that decision, as now I have plenty of reason for why that one would be my favourite. I'm like "Wow, there's such an impression of depth and these colours just vibrate together". Yeesh.

Me and my brother and cousin recently hung out. We were originally going to go to one of the great lakes, but I had to cancel our original hang out date due to conflicting obligations. When I offered a tentative time in late November, they both jumped at the idea, but I guess it didn't occur to any of us that it wouldn't exactly be swimming weather.

We went to Hamilton and cruised around until we found a spot where we could access the beech.  Hamilton has a reputation for smelling bad, and when my cousin and brother showed enthusiasm to access this place, I felt they already knew about this reputation and that my input would just perpetuate a stereotype.

But when we got out, both of them were like "Wow, it smells bad" and I was like "Of course it smells bad, it's Hamilton" and they were like, "If you knew it smelled so bad here, why didn't you say anything?" and I was like "I thought everyone knew that Hamilton smells bad"

We visited a place with a bunch of boats. Some people sent a hand signal at me, so I sent one back to them. My brother and cousin asked if I knew them. I said I didn't, I was just improvising. Then we got kicked out.

So eventually the smell, the cold, and the hostile boat people chased us away. We got to see some cool birds, though. Some swans, and also what might have been a flock of common merganser. I've seen hooded meganser and red breasted merganser, so if those were actual common merganser, I think I've sighted every type of merganser.

Anyway, we eventually had to retreat. Since the original idea was to paint something, my cousin invited s over to her place. She and my brother decided to paint a bowl of pears and pomegranates. For some reason, I got overambitious and tried to paint a conch shell. I would not recommend this for new painters. The top of the conch came out okay, but I couldn't make the bottom look concave.

Felt real bad when my cousin and brother's fruit paintings came out nice and my conch shell looked flat. But I've since painted a bowl of fruit and now I know that is a far moe achievable goal.