My Grandmother Lives Alone Part II: A Senior Explorations Amplified Piece by Chiara Neyman (2014)

For the Blink unit, my class was given four prompts and a short amount of time to explore each one through writing and visuals. The first prompt we completed was ''Thought,'' which inspired my written piece, My Grandmother Lives Alone Part I, as well as my visual piece, My Grandmother Lives Alone Part II. My mood has an extreme effect on my quality of life. If I feel awful (for whatever reason,) colors fade, perky noise flattens to a monotone drone, and it's hard to tell the days apart. When I feel nice it's the opposite. When prompted to write about thought, this spectrum of feeling came to mind and I followed it through stream of consciousness writing and visual art.

I produced the fine art portion of My Grandmother Lives Alone Part II with colored pencil on Dura-Lar (which is kind of like thick wax paper, or translucent shrinky dink paper that doesn't shrink.) I set my piece of Dura-Lar down on the table and loosely traced the wood grain. I drew only in shades of purple because my writing was about the lint trap of a dryer, the products of which I associate with the color purple. I scanned that with a drawing of a face I crafted and brought it into Photoshop where I layered it on top of a picture I took of the sunrise. I chose this picture because because with so much going on with my fine art components I knew I would need an abstract background which would be less distracting. I also thought the pastels went nicely with the purples and the pale face. After layering everything together I added some text and put select chunks through a filter.