Floating Island project

I am supposed to teach an online art class tomorrow but it seems a bit up in the air at this point. I prepared a fantasy world-building course starting with this floating island project, hoping to get the creative juices flowing with this idea.

It is aimed at children from the Green Apple Art Center, a school where I have taught a few classes before. It must be a very different experience teaching online, but I am excited at the idea of creating a space for creativity, similarly to workshops I have been participating in. I am very passionate about traditional media and its technical challenges, going from a pencil sketch to an ink drawing.

At that age, artists remember how to play, which is why I think it is important for the result to be open-ended with no way to fail. Of course, I strive to convey some rudiments of perspective but how my students choose to apply these principles is entirely up to them.

• It is useful to create a cluster of habitations in the background and work your way forward on the land surface.

• The horizon line is the same as how high the viewer's eyes are. If you can see the roof of a building, you are above it. Birds Eye views are useful to show larger parts of a city.

• Who are your inhabitants, what do they eat? How do they go around? Finding creative solutions is precisely what thinking outside the box is all about.

Thumbnails make for a fantastic opportunity to commit to many crazy ideas without spending too much time. So often I have spontaneously designed powerful compositions that were hard to scale up as I struggled to find a compromise between the simplicity of the small drawing and ways to sell the idea.

Maybe it is because I do not judge the thumbnails as harshly and accept whatever comes out. There really is something to be said about that.

I often try to remember how patient I was, drawing as a kid because I was so engrossed in the process. I am getting a much clearer picture as things have considerably slowed down since the confinement. I have also stayed away from this very blog, waiting for the burning desire to share. It must come naturally because things are just too precarious to waste time on hobbies that feel cumbersome.

I want to be more connected to my emotions delve a bit into what drives me as a human being. It's the abysmal effect of the blog, like two mirrors facing each other with reality eating the content and vice versa.

Anyhow, this lesson might be cancelled due to low enrollment which is a shame since I prepared a nifty little PowerPoint for it. I am still grateful for the artistic focus it took to put this together, I will certainly recycle the project at some point.

I opted for a simpler array of dwellings for this one, trying to show the structure of the basements in order to plop the buildings up from there. My friend called it very Nintendo of me with the windmill.

This enchanting watercolour is a teaser of the next class, I was fascinated by the village in the trees of the Robin Hood movie from the 90s. You know? The one with Morgan Freeman?

I am still in Montreal, waiting to be in my partner's arms which will be in August. Here a local family is preparing for a new normal for Sabbath.

Someone from the @naturalmedicine community taught me that you can grow mung beans to the length of chop suey. I tried it with adzuki beans, their close red cousin. It worked!

And here we have a vegan quinoa feast. Delicious with a bit of soy sauce. My mom adds green peas to many recipes and they complemented our tomato paste flavoured tofu beautifully.

This blog is always on my mind. There have been so many wonderful meals, games and activities to share but life has a way of deciding what part of the journey should aid in content creation. I am very grateful to have the Hive blockchain and this wonderful community as I find it incredible stimulating.

Until next time.