July 1: 

 Today in my first day of Design Portfolio at Parsons (The New School), we began our design project by searching the city for inspiration. I greatly enjoyed hunting for detail and shape within the incredible architecture of New York, and found inspiration surprisingly easy to find. The thinking skills I'm developing in this course have already changed the way I view art and design, and the design process is becoming increasingly more interesting each day. From our inspiration, we started to develop shapes and forms that could be translated into a wearable garment. This I found surprisingly difficult because of the intense critical thinking required, but once I found my rhythm I was able to translate some good ideas onto paper. Next we started multiple figure drawing exercises from a live model, some 30-second drawings, some 5-minute drawings, and some 10-minute drawings. I really enjoyed these exercises because they were great practice and I find the human body exceedingly interesting. Drawing from a live model was somewhat difficult because the proportions were sometimes hard to perfect, but I was reminded of how to measure in terms of "heads" and was able to portray her proportions accurately for the most part. Overall, a very successful first day of classes!