Portfolio

Below is a showcase of what I consider my six overall best pieces of work from my junior and senior years of Freestyle!

Junior Year

Shown below are three pieces from my junior year of high school (2020-2021).

Conceptual: Negative Positive Space Halloween Project

The media below was of my Negative and Positive Space Halloween Project. The first photo was my final result after using an X-Acto Knife, construction paper, and glue to create a witch. The video is a 20-second time-lapse sketch I did on Procreate of my original idea; a day before I worked on paper. This project was meant to have symmetry when cutting and flipping the paper and I decided to create vertical symmetry. As you may see from the final product, the piece shows alternating negative and positive space.

Narrative: Creature

For this project, I used Adobe Illustrator to create my creature and its background. The creature itself consists of a combination of five different animals to represent Kit’s personality: a deer for peace, a turtle for wisdom, a butterfly for charm, a sparrow for intelligence, and a shark for assertiveness. Once I thought over my animal choices, I found references for each animal part, created a color palette, and started working on the actual project. After multiple weeks of editing and revising, I was able to successfully create my final creature and moved onto the background right afterward. I ended up deciding on a monologous theme and created the bathroom to relate back to the situation in my story. This process did not take that long; changing the monologous palette from purple to green and fixing up the gradients in the backdrop as well. After finishing up final touches on lighting and small details, the project was finished.

Final Product

Documentary: Magazine Article

I focused on a documentary project all about interviewing a person and telling their story! This included the process of capturing the person’s unique perspective on their subject and gathering other primary and secondary research sources which talk about the topic as well. I put the spotlight on my grandfather, Wai-Hon Lee, and his story all about his adventure through learning and practicing Chinese calligraphy. To represent the importance of this topic, we focused on integrating it into an advertisement, an essay, a brochure, and many other assignments.

Press the image to visit Issuu, and view “The Hidden Art of Chinese Calligraphy” magazine!

Senior Year

Shown below are three pieces from my senior year of high school (2021-2022).

Reflections: Colored & LED Mandala

One value I gained from this mandala project was being able to enjoy the process of creating this piece of art, and being able to celebrate its creation in the real world too with its existence also on an LED light. I also really appreciated the thought process of the mandalas I created this unit and think that this experience was a gain of becoming more at peace with myself and my own mind.

In regards to this reflection unit and trying to answer the question, “Who am I?” I have been able to learn to follow my intuition. This mandala taught me to let my body and my calmness do most of the work and believe that they are capable of just as much as I would thinking through it “normally.” I learned to thus trust my own intuition and not think too much about the outcome but rather the enjoyment of the process.

Use the mover below to view between my black and white outlined mandala and my finished colored one!

black and white mandala before image colored mandala after image
Progress Video
Final LED Mandala
LED Mandala Drawing

Narrative 2: Multi-Layered Art Project

The main inspiration for this project was to create a stylized piece that could fit together well between me and my friend Leanna. We worked on this project together and wanted to represent both of our unique art styles and habits. Both of our art styles revolve around anime which is something we are both constantly inspired by when creating drawings. As for habits, I would define that as characteristics we incorporate into art constantly. This is our reason for basing our characters around a galaxy with stars theme and a pond with flowers theme. Since we wanted to represent our close friendship, we decided on asymmetry and puzzle piece-related structure to build our theme. We also incorporated a lily pad and a moon for our separate pieces to represent our sides coming together like a yin and yang. This yin and yang represent our togetherness even with our differences and our bond with our Chinese ethnicities.

Celestial Oasis
Final Celestial Oasis Adobe Illustrator
Timelapse Assembly Video

Zenith: Acrylic Painted & Embroidered Clothes

The Zenith project was all about choosing what we wanted to end our Freestyle experience with. Deciding on this project was one part of the process where we chose how we wanted to challenge ourselves. My Zenith project in particular was an embroidery and acrylic painting clothes craft. I decided on embroidering stars and painting waves on a pair of black pants and a black bucket hat. I was really passionate about this project going in and was especially excited about doing the embroidery part of the project since this would be my first time doing it. I envisioned having the waves on the rim of the bucket hat and the bottom of the pair of pants to represent how waves rise. I also chose to have my stars higher on the waves to kind of show how they may float in water. This project became a challenge for me; especially with time. I did well in self-teaching and finding out-of-the-box solutions for my problems, but I definitely struggled with how I structured each major deadline. With how permanent any mistake may pose on the final product, I found it hard to persevere through those sorts of moments. With close deadlines from other classes as well, this made the time crunch even more stressful. However, by giving myself new ways to be productive with this project, I was able to go around these struggles and advance in the project. I would definitely say that with each step of the process, I succeeded in continuing my project and completed it by the final deadline.

Press the first slide of my presentation below to view it!

Zenith Presentation First Slide
Me Presenting my Zenith Project to the PM Design classes!

College Portfolio

Below are the pieces I submitted as portfolios to three of the universities I applied to. About half of the pieces I submitted are Freestyle projects and half are my own personal projects. I additionally submitted my Documentary project intro video and article. They are listed under the main menu at the top of my page.