It’s the last little bit of the marathon and it feels the part. It takes a lot of focus to keep going.
To prepare for the big shift from school projects to paying projects I’ve started tracking the time I spend working with Harvest. It would’ve been a good idea to start doing this while I was still in school but I’m in the habit of recording and scheduling working time in Calendar already (that's probably evident from the heat maps above). The benefit of Harvest is that it provides some really nice reporting, estimating and invoicing tools. I’m about a third through the free trial and it’s neat to see where my time is going and all the hours that were sucked out working on something else.
Also included in the rewards for being a backer was a letterpress bookmark and your name in the back of the book. Jack added in a nice thank you card too.
A book I backed on Kickstarter arrived. It’s called These Days by Jack Cheng. He provided weekly updates about the project to his backers which was the original motivation to do these updates about my last semester. Here’s a two sentence synopsis of the book:
I'm looking forward to reading it full time once school is finished.
We also had our last day of illustration and the sketchbook assignment was “change”. We took an old drawing and then redrew it again in different styles. My teacher Mike also brought in all his old work. It’s amazing to see how much he’s changed over his career. It made sense why he wanted that to be the theme of the sketchbook exercise for the last day. I took some photos of the work that I did in the morning.
I took my pattern and drew it in line and then focused on the negative space on the page.
I took some of the faces from the pattern and made them huge.
Drawing one of the faces with a single continuous line only.
Painting one of the faces with a palette knife.
I was working on the presentation for the sushi project the day before it was due and green tea and my Retrospective playlist on Rdio fuelled the night. Bed was at 2:15. That's much later than normal but it was fun. Late nights are exciting every once in a while but a terrible habit to get into.
When we arrived for the critique Friday morning a few of us met and breathed a collective sigh of relief. Even though there was still hints of anxiety about how the presentation would go there was no more time to make changes and we were going up with what we had. It's nice to have that finish line. Otherwise I can see us making adjustments endlessly. The critique was long but it was good to see everyone’s work. There was laughing and applause and congratulations and some people even did a little bit of napping. But we did it together. There was such camaraderie at the end. My instructor Xerxes reminded us these people are the strongest support network we’ll ever have.
The days left can be counted on one hand. Only a few more paces to the finish line.