thanksgiving break part II

Thanksgiving break for me this year was a loaded week. For the first half of the week my goal was to soak in as much as home and family as I could because came Wednesday the Uskoski's swept me away to Bend, Oregon (much to my mother's dismay). We, being Cody's family and their close family friends the Levenon's, stayed in a town called Redmond in a nice little house.

This was to be my first skiing excursion, we meant to go Thursday and Friday but due to lack of snow we ended up just going on Friday. To make up for no skiing Thursday we got tricked into going on a "hike" to a waterfall close by. I put hike in quotations because normally you can drive up to the falls, but because it was icy the road was blocked off so you end up just walking down a slushy/icy/snowy road. The end result was pretty and worth it but we just wanted to play games in the warm indoors and drink cocoa all day. We would've been better sports had we been asked if we wanted to go but we got tricked into going. First it was a mile hike, then 3 1/2 then rumor that it was 5 1/2 .... we're not sure if we walked 7 or 11 miles.

this might've been a frozen pond that I tried to walk on that i might've dunked my foot into

Friday we set off early-ish to go to Mount Bachelor. I'm not going to lie I've had mini panic attacks everytime I thought about skiing for the last couple months. It's not that I didn't think that I could do it, I just have a very worse-case-scenario brain. All in all I had a really good time though. Cody was good and just stuck next to me the whole time and let me go my pace. I crashed a total of 4 times and it wasn't even by accident. I would just get going too fast and not know how to stop and just go down. I have mixed feelings about skiing because on one hand you're surrounded by GORGOUS scenery, the kind you feel blessed to be able to see but somehow gets a little ruined in the panic stricken/tense bodied experience of not wanting to crash as you fly down a hill. Cody and I stuck to the bunny hill for the first part of the day... mostly because my biggest battle in skiing is trying to psyche myself out. Some of those hills look REALLY steep!

i wanted a picture in front of this sign you can't read it but it says Marshmallow: Easiest Run Down... we found it quite entertaining

After lunch where I was called a wimp for not going on a run we decided to go on an easy one. So we went on the Marshmallow trail. Yes, I picked it on purpose. I just thought it was hillarious that they would give something such a fluffy baby name, especially when compared to devil's backbone! which was on the other side of the mountain. I feel twice, the last being my most epic which has left me the awesome souvenir of a huge wicked looking bruise on my right knee. It accompanies my skiing stories quite good.

I will definately go skiing again, but I don't think I'll ever get hardcore at it, I think I'll be more of a leisure skiier. After we got back from Bend I tried to spend a lot of times playing games with my family (it's what we taylor's do best!).

Now I'm back at icy/snowy Rexburg with a TON of work to do for the last two and a half weeks of school.

Now.......I just want Christmas.

fishes and knitted things

Fishes: These koi were inspired by a park we went to in China called Peach Tree Island Park. There was a giant pond and a bridge where you could feed all of these swarming koi. It was quite neat. I had this picture that was just full of brilliant color that I knew I wanted to use as inspiration. The technique? Paint, sand off, build it back up, sand off more if you choose. A lot of us had a hard time sanding off the painting we had just spent hours doing but it gives it quite a look. And as a treat you get an art term for the day, when you have everything out of focus, and kind of blurry around and then a center point of focus that is in detail is called a vignette, as done in the fish picture.

knitted hat: I was super stoked to do this painting. Megan had taken this picture of herself to show off her newly knitted saggy hat and I just had to paint it. I have never done a human in a painting before and it's one of the most challenging subjects (especially without taking head drawing which I haven't). But I just loved the picture a lot and so did my teacher (he has to pre-approve our photo reference). It's supposed to be our own picture but I was running out of China ones that I felt I could do cool paintings of...and I figured my sister is close enough to me, so I hope you don't mind that I took your picture, but I think it makes up for it that it's a picture of you. I've always felt Megan is the prettier sister and so it was really fun to capture her beautiful profile into a painting. And it's an ode to her amazing knitting skills which really is impressive.

The technique for this one was called photo copy mount down. You take a photo-copy of your picture, or line drawing (i did a line drawing of this). Then you use matt-medium or gloss-medium to mount it to the board and put another one or two layers of it on top and it's ready to paint on. We also used wet and dry sand paper to give it a neat texture, it's hard to tell from the picture but it really turned out neat.

enjoy.

the right way to spend halloween at college

I feel like I have been blessed up at college. I have gotten to be really good friends with my roommate Kristy. She's from Rupert, Idaho, which means she's heard of Almo and has been to the city of rocks!! She's possibly the nicest girl I have ever known (example our other roommate Jessica was struggling with her math homework and Kristy sat with her for like an hour helping her figure stuff out, I consider myself a nice person but I would've never done that).
So for Halloween I would've probably just stayed at home, but luckily we have these three guys in our ward that were our apartment's FHE brothers last semester. One of them called up Kristy and asked if we wanted to go to a haunted theatre in Shelley (a little outside idaho falls). We stopped by Dustin's grandparents house for treats (one should never refuse grandparent treats) and then we went to this old theatre that was turned into a haunted house. We definately were scared and I had Kristy death-clutching me the whole time. Afterwards we went to taco bell and just hung out at the guy's apartments and made balloons into creatures. I bragged I knew how to make a dog but somehow came out with a headless dog... I couldn't remember that part, I only knew how to make the legs... woops. Overall successful halloween free from slutty pirates and scandalous nurses. I just am thankful to have a good group of friends where we can have a good wholesome fun night of halloween.

Tape Technique

Last assignment we were told to do cool shadow with warm light. This time around he flipped it. Warm shadow with cool light. It was a challenge because my brain worked with the other way but it took a little more energy to think about it on this one. The other focus on this assignment was texture.

First we start with a warm underpainting, mostly monochromatic.

Then you take packaging tape and cover the whole thing.

Next paint on your cool lights onto the tape.

Then using your finger nails, or any object you can find you can scratch off where you want to put texture.

The ball and owl were my in class practices. I kinda went crazy on the background of the ball.

I have some fixes to do but here are the bears. I told Cody it looked like desert polar bears and he said it was probably just a statement about global warming. :)

enjoy

supply for the demand

Here's my two latest pieces I've done. They are both from my media experiment class.

This first one was a photo transfer technique. You take a photo or a line drawing and print it out on a toner printer. To transfer it you put it face down on literally any surface then take a blender marker and color over the picture. Then take a burnisher or anything else you can find to rub it onto the surface, transferring the picture onto it. After we had our picture we painted over it in acrylic. I kept mine really thin washes but you can go thicker to where you can't see the lines anymore if you so desire.

This was our first assignment that was a color assignment. We're all the way in acrylics now, where as before you could choose to do oil over your acrylics if you wanted. Our assignment was warm light, cool shadow and really exaggerate it. My professor saw this picture I had and told me it would be perfect for the next assignment (this assignment).

Our newest assignment we just got today is warm shadow, cool light and I'll be putting up pictures of that soon.

Oil Lift Out

These two pieces are the newest technique we've learned called oil lift out. You start with a wash all over your surface with a mixture of oil and turpentine (which actually breaks down the paint). You then go back and lift out what you don't want dark. You can go back over it afterward with a wash of a different color or add more opaque paint to it to build detail.

This tree picture was my practice that I did in class. It shows how good of silhouettes you can do with this technique but if I wanted it to be a really good piece I would go back and add things because it's too simple in itself. We'll see what I do with it.

This buddha painting is actually taken from a picture I took in China when we were in Hong Kong and visited the Big Buddha statue. I did a dark blue wash over all of it and then I went back and added the purple background color. The neat thing you can do with this technique is what you can see in the sky. If you drip turpentine on the paint it breaks it up and does this little neat thing. You can also paint some on, tilt the board and then you get a cool dripping affect, or crackling affect.

so... ta da!

The Taco Bus

What is this?..... Why it is the Taco Bus. When my dad dropped me off here at the beginning of the semester we drove past a silver bus. I looked at it and was like hmm... looks like a taco stand. It wasn't until I saw a gleaming "open" sign in the front that told me that it was actually legit.
My roommates with me agreed that we needed to check out this "taco bus." Everybody we mentioned it to knew exactly what we were talking about and apparently it was AMAZING so we had to go see for ourselves. And you know what? It's pretty darn fantastic.

The first time we went we were kind of nervous... I mean you never know about these kind of things. It was empty but as we were waiting for our food four other cars pulled up. Then today when we went two more cars full of people showed up. Apparently all the teachers and tons of students love it.

inside the taco bus.
They actually put benches and tables up so you can eat inside

Story behind the story, turns out that this couple (mexican) drove this bus down here after the husband lost his job. They then opened this taco stand and have been here ever since the beginning of this last summer.

i'm an art major!

More so than other semesters I'm really starting to embrace my art-major-ness. I've got the drawing class and design/color class out of the way (pre-reqs for every other art class) which gives me the freedom and chance to take real art classes. This semester I am enrolled in Intro to Illustration and Media Experimentation. The first one is pretty self explanatory the second class has a big word title. I always saw art-work up from that class in the Spori (art building) and was so super impressed. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty intimidated by this class but am now grateful for it. We're going to do some super neat things that I'm so excited to share with all of you.

For Illustration we first had an assignment, "Fire". We could do any medium, any design, format whatever. I only had acrylics so that's what I chose to do it in. And you can't really see it but for the veins of the leaf I did the Chinese character for fire.


The second assignment that he has all of his classes do was a cookbook. We find a recipe and illustrate it only requirement was that it had to be in perspective. I love this class purely for the chance to just be plain creative. Other classes it's more about technique and then once you get that down you can go draw what you want on your own time. This class we'll have a lot more chances to show off our creativity. We got to choose the recipe so looking it up I stumbled upon this little gem and instantly had a vision of what I was going to do.



Now the best for last. For our first assignment in Media Experiment we started in oils. There are other oil classes offered here that teach you the gob on as much paint as you can technique but our teacher wanted to give us a different technique to have under our belt. This was more oil glazing with photo rendering. That meant we took a picture of a simple object (he said it'd be best with a fruit, or vegetable or just something with a simple shape) all I had was an onion so that's what I went with. After starting it I realized that this was going to be a challenge. But it definately paid off in critiques today in class.
(ps. my camera warped the pictures of them a little bit. the real photograph's colors are a lot cooler but when i printed it out on a 8X10 it really did turn the colors to that greenish gray, and warmer like in my painting...aka looks better in person)



enjoy.

Rexburg... blah.. blah.. school.. blah.. blah..

I just wanted to give a little update on everything that's been happening in a little town we call Rexburg.

Today is the end of my first full week of school which means I have my classes, roommates and teachers down well enough to figure out how this semester's going to pan out.

I'm living at Tuscany again. They really are the best girl's housing around (other than the ridge but that's for the people that really don't care for the rules). My motto here is single rooms save lives. Because they really do. No matter how much you get along with somebody, it's always nicer to have a room to yourself. A nice little retreat and especially a quiet(ish) place to do homework. My roommates are AMAZING, and trust me when I say I'm not using that word lightly. This set of roommates is seriously the ones you dream of having before you go to college for the first time, but you know you're not going to get because you need to learn some life lesson or "people skills". We just all get along so perfect. I've never been in an environment where complete strangers are ALL so kind, nice, generous, helpful and fun. Usually there's one or two that you avoid, but thankfully not this time. (I'll share more about them later).

My schedule is do-able but is keeping me very busy with homework. I'm taking two 3 hour art classes, Intro to Illustration and Media Experiment. They are both wonderful classes that are going to benefit me a lot but both are crazily challenging and completely take me out of my comfort zone. I'm also taking an online Chinese Literature class (to complete the requirements for foreign language), a money management class and the second half of Art History. But the one that I want to brag to you all the most about is my religion class. I decided to take Teachings of the Living Prophets and as I was looking for a teacher on the registration site my eyes scrolled down the list of names and I came to one, Clark.... Kim Clark... well the only Kim Clark I know is the president of.. the.. school. So yes, I am taking my religion class from not only the ex-dean of Harvard Business, but the PRESIDENT of our school and a general authority! I really truly feel most blessed to have gotten into this class, and just by chance! Last class he had a budget meeting to go to, (he team teaches the class with another professor who is a good teacher as well), but today we had the full two hour class to ourselves with Pres. Clark. What I love most is first, just the presence he brings into the class. There's a certain level of authority that enters when he teaches. Also, he is just a good guy. He cares about us students so much, and not just our educational welfare but also our physical and spiritual as well. And he has a sense of humor. We can have fun with him while learning. I just feel super blessed to be able to learn from him every week.

Last of all, recent happenings. Last Saturday our town hosts what they call "Rexburg Unplugged". They take up a side street that connects to main street where local businesses have a chance to introduce themselves to the students. Chantelle and I went because you get a bag full of coupons and there's usually more freebies. We have a Paul Mitchell beauty school that does your hair crazy for free. (see picture). Also in the picture I'm holding not just an ordinary corn on the cob but they call it "Nacho Libre Corn". For any of you who have seen the movie you know what it is. But they cover it in butter, then what they call spanish parmesian cheese and then chile/lime powder. Chantelle was a little hesitant to try but I thought I'd take the risk. And you know what risks sometimes pay off! It was delectible!! I also partook in a night of Craigo's with a group of friends from our first semester here. Craigo's is kind of our thing. And I got to try my very first cookie monster. YUM! (think chocolate chip cookie bottom, with ice-cream, with whipped cream, with caramel and chocolate syrup on top in a pie pan...serves about 8).

my little bag of goodies and a tiger's blood/mango snowcone

So there's a quick summary of what's been going on. I'll be sure to give you some more depth later.

Back At the Burg

Welp I have once again found myself alone back in good ol' Rexburg. I love the start and end of school because that means I get a little mini-vacation at my grandparent's house and get to see family (who I don't see enough of). I was lucky enough to have my dad bring me out and have my good friend Chantelle (went to China with me) come with us.

This semester I'm still living at the same apartment complex, Tuscany, but I switched rooms. I really loved my roommates from Fall/Winter last year but my very first roommate from freshmen year became available and I have wanted to live with her since my first semester. It's nice though, because I am just a tower away from my old room so I will go and visit all the time because 3/5 old roommates are there again.

It's looking to shape up to be a good semester room mate wise. I have Emily (my old roommate) who if you ask my dad he will tell you is full of giggles and happiness. Then there is Kristy and Kaylee who seem really cool and just really nice girls. There's another Jessica (I'll never escape the curse of the multiple Jessica's) who is a freshmen in her first semester. So we're helping her out. And Elizabeth makes six who is from Africa and loves to cook. She'll keep our apartment smelling nice which will either suck or be good depending on how hungry I am. I can't foresee any major problems happening other than all of us just getting to know each other better.

Today was nothing day so Chantelle and I just went to campus and got our books and looked around (I'll update you on the changes construction has brought here) and just hung out. Classes start tomorrow, I only have one from 3-5:45, Intro to Illustration, all I can say is SLEEP IN!

Next week when I've been to all of my classes I'll give a report on how they go. I'm really excited I think I have a good schedule and if I keep myself busy enough I won't get too homesick.


I loved seeing all of my family at grandma's. When I got to see everyone I realize how much I miss them being a frequent part of my life.

Cheers to the Taylor Family. ♥

happy america day

Since the economy isn't doing so good lately we found ourselves with zero plans for the fourth. usually there's rusty's family, people at my dad's work, our friends do something or they have an awesome show at Fort Vancouver. But alas... we had nothing.

The first part of the day was a hit. My dad took us all out to a pretty driving range out in Ridgefield where you hit into a giant pond. Cody, and me had never hit before so it was a bit interesting, but still really fun. We then went back to the Taylor house for a gourmet barbeque. All different kinds of ingredients were present to make yummy little gourmet burgers.

As for fireworks we decided we'd just go up to Cody's house. His house is situated on the top of a hill in Yacolt with a gorgeous view that spans all the way to Portland. So we'd figure we'd bum off other people's shows. We told all our friends they could come if they wanted but didn't expect anybody else. It was perfect. My best friend from high school, Amy came, and our good friend Matt Moss along with Megan and some of Cody's friends... Oh yeah, did I mention a pool? :)

June 25th… The One Year Anniversary

One year ago I was just barely re-adjusting myself to life in America again…and life with a new boy Everything’s just as perfect as it was a year ago..but it doesn’t feel like a whole year went by, as it often happens forever’s just not enough with Cody.

So for our anniversary, knowing me to the be the animal girl I am

We went to the zoo.

the rarest of all, the "cody"-ak bear, jessica donating a dollar via vulture and baby elephant

we have this place in our zoo where you can go into a little area of larikeet birds and buy apple juice nectar and feed it to them. for some reason everytime i've gone in i can just summon birds at will. this is me with the only two red ones that everybody else was trying to get. and yes the one on my right shoulder was licking my face, not biting, licking.

We ended the day with a lovely dinner at McCormick and Schmicks, a very nice seafood restaurant, down my the marina on the waterfront in Portland.

no i'm not dead.. just a disgrace to the blogging world

I don't know how many "i'm sorry i haven't kept up my blog" posts i've done but well.. here's another.

i've been back since april 11th. that's over two months of adventures that you've missed out on hearing about.

I got a nifty new touch phone, the verizon dare, which doubles as a sweet little on the go camera so i'll let the pictures talk for most of it...

there was a beach trip (of course)

this is our ecola beach,

it's perfect because the mountains protect us from blechy wind

ate at doogers (good clam chowder)

some cool flowers growing on a rock

Cruised Portland a couple times... ate at Todai's (the best sushi in the area)

Went to Rhodendendron Gardens,

This was an option for Megan's reception, though GORGOUS, it was a bit of a drive and all of the flowers would've been gone by august.

still, it was a pretty neat place. As shown in the picture, the bushes were HUGE

Played Frisbee at LVP with our good friend Jeff

(some pictures we took after)

Saw a REAL life DeLorean,

proceeded to follow it through town to get this awesome picture, and creeped the guy out, everytime there was a stop sign or light he'd speed off trying to lose us.

bought this creepy "Lanky Cat" for Cody's sister for her birthday

She said she wanted a cat and since I couldn't get her a real one I got her this thing

it's creepy, but cute..?

some stuff that doesn't pictures to go with it:

-i have also looked for a job for the summer....and have failed miserably. I have a job lined up for our county fair working at a burger stand (we know the owners of the restuarant that put up the stand) So hopefully that works out.

-Cody and I are still marathoning Gilmore Girls. We're finally on the last season we have about 8 episodes left. Such the good show.

-Cody's been doing miscellaneous labor for his family earning a few bucks here and there.

-I've been taking up riding my bike (well megan's bike) around town

-We work out at our local gym three days a week

-Still play basketball on thursdays with our ward. Probably the highlight of my week. Don't under-estimate the Taylor sisters

-Cody and I have taken up playing tennis for funsies some days

-Hanging out with my bff Amy who's back from school in Canada

other than that we just keep on keeping on.

Highlight Blogs that deserve their own post to come in the very near future that I should've blogged about but failed to, Cody and Rusty's baptism, and my friend Katie's wedding.