School Trip and Zombie bashing

Dear friends – I am well and safe in New York, I don’t write a soften because I don’t realize how fast time passes by. Let me sum up the most important things that happened over the past days. Our class did a day trip to the “Norman Rockwell” museum in Stockbridge – Rockwell was a very popular American illustrator and painter from the 1920s-1950s. His paintings are considered as the visualization of the “American dream”, the “American” him or herself, but he also showed some “downsides” and saw the humorous side of life. I enjoyed the trip a lot and I really loved the paintings. Below our class in Stockbridge.

In general, I love the “History of American Illustration” lectures – I learn about illustrators I have never heard about before and I enjoy their styles and the topics they visualize very much. Let me mention some of my favorite so far: William Dana Gibson, Aubrey Beardsley, Winsor Mc Cay, John Held Junior, Howard Pyle, Jessie Willcox Smith, N.C. Wyeth, Thomas Nast and many more.

In life drawing, the exercises are not easy, they are very challenging which I appreciate. I am still not able to use what I learn for my own purpose, but I am still patient and I am sure I will profit.

On Sunday, I had my first game with my all girls RPG group – we just founded it, and had an absolutely fantastic game. The five of us, Mary, Melissa (the game master), Michelle and Lena decided to play “RISUS” an indie roleplaying game system that has six pages of rules. The characters don’t work with attributes and skills, but with “clichés” – for example, my character is a German who immigrated to the US and has the clichés “Private Eye” (includes shooting people, intimidating, wearing a slazy trench coat and attracting femme-fatales), “Alien Parasite” (super healing and dimensional portal opening), and, within others, my favorite: “Saving people in last second (in slo-motion) while screaming Nooooo!”. We put diced in those clichés and roll them when it seems appropriate. Melissa put an awesome game together: Levar from the 80s show “Reading Rainbows” – a show were children is taught how super cool reading is – reads the “Necronomicon” to the children and thereby makes them soulless zombies. We saved the day, but some children had to die or were mutilated. Let me point out that my character was always against actually killing them! But some people always have to behead little zombie-girls (point my finger at Michelles character ;-) ). Below a photo (from left to right: Melissa, Lena, Mary who thinks "If I can't see you, you cant see me" would be a great power and Michelle) from our group after harvesting on the chocolate fun-due! Please notice the TV in the background! ITS A MONSTER!

Of course I couldn’t resist drawing the groups characters – from left to right Sonja (who can make things explode), Leopold (prive eye and dimensional traveler), Zeek the Geek (who can travel trough wires) and Patricia (can see the souls of things and has a samurai sword).