Week 7

Its been a while since I got back on here and actually did a blog. But, this would be the seventh week within Italy, and this is also our return trip from the travel week that I discussed in the previous week. The entire trip was a blast, but, its time that we get back to the grind of school and classes back here at the villa.

For this week, we started our classes back up and did an Italian class again and we started our painting class. We were also supposed to be doing our Journal and Blogging class on the side and with our own time. The Italian class is the same and its really starting to more challenging. We’ve been learning a lot and there’s just so much to each word. One word could have 10 different forms depending on how you use it. But, the whole Italian class has basically been the same as it as before. The only thing that I wish is that, in the beginning, we spent that first week in Rome and the second week in Naples going to museums and local towns. I wished that we had saved those first 2 weeks for being the last 2 weeks because then we could spend our time at the villa, getting used to the country and all the travel, while learning Italian so that we would be able to communicate with people when we went on those trips. It probably would of made things a lot easier for people because I remember some people saying that had a bit of anxiety especially with all the travel around. So, things just would of been much easier had we saved those for being the last 2 weeks.

As for the painting class, the first week was really a blast. We learned some basics of what to do and a bit of color theory. For the first week, we had to replicate a piece that we liked. We first had to come up with a rough draft drawing of the piece that we were gonna do. Then we had to have a painted rough draft drawing and we had to come up with the final piece along with a piece of our own that we painted.

For me, it was a bit difficult because I’m not too much of an artist. So, my drawing and painting skills aren’t quite as good as everyone else’s. I tried to the best I could and I thought that my stuff came out pretty good. For the piece that I chose to do my replication of, it was Starry Night by Van Gogh. I was going to do the whole thing, but I’m not really someone that can scale down pieces that well. So, I decided to just do the top right corner of the piece. The drawing was alright, and my painted rough draft turned out really well. The painted final wasn’t quite as good as the rough draft, but that’s what you learn in painting.

As for my piece that I chose to do on my own, it was something I did quickly because I didn’t really know what to paint at first. This week in Italy was actually pretty cold and raining all week. So, I just thought of fire and painted a candle. It turned out alright, I wasn’t too impressed with it.

At the end of this week, on Friday, we have our day off of no classes, but, we still do things for class. We went to a town called Asisi that has a pretty important church there along with some other structures. We went there and look at some paintings that went in with the painting class and we also got to check out some architecture of the local buildings. One thing that I loved about the town was the view. It sits on top of a hilltop and we hiked further up in the town and got to check out the view even more.