Introduction
I really loved the Refections project. As a senior you spend a lot of time reflecting on your life, we have to write all of theses essays reflecting on specific situations in our lives and you have to write these essays extremely well because the goal is to get into college but at Freestyle we didn’t have to spend time reflecting with any other motive. We simply got to create artwork that represents ourselves and in this process of making these projects we get to learn about ourselves. People always say “It’s the process, not the result” and before these projects I was like “Yeah, right” because I hadn’t been given projects that were more gratifying to make, then the actual result. But, when I was making these project I felt very relaxed and that I was able to look inside. In English, we wrote a personal reflection essay. In Digital Media, we made mandalas and did Photoshop art. In Film, we made a video that was meant for us to reflect on a lesson we have learned or something that makes us unique.
Who Am I? A question we were giving as an overarching theme throughout our reflections project. I spend a lot of time thinking about this question, this has always been a hard question for me to answer. How can I know who I am without being able to understand myself objectively. I have decided that, because I will never be able to meet myself and decide who I am, I am what I make, I am how I treat other people, I am the people I surround myself with, I am the things I love and I am the things I don’t like. The Reflections project helped me figure this out because I was able to simply create to create and this helped me find who I am or at least who I am right now.
Mandala
Write a short paragraph intro about the Mandala Project, the process of using Illustrator.
Before and After Black and White Mandala
I loved creating this Mandala! When I was younger I had this coloring book full of Mandalas, that I would color in all the time. So being able to create my own Mandala was so cool. This project made me appreciate the intricacy of Mandalas and how creative people get with them. I also love this form of art because you don’t have to be amazing at art to do it, really it is just a series of strokes and patterns that come together to make a beautiful piece of art. I look forward to seeing the engraving. I really enjoyed this experience and hope to make more in the future.
Photoshop Art
Photoshop was a medium that I had thought to be pretty hard to use. But, the series of projects we did on it really opened me up to how easy Photoshop could make your life. I am not the most talented artist on a regular paper, but on Photoshop I felt that I could make anything I put my mind to. Photoshop also has everything you can think of and more from every brush you can imagine to every type of paper there is. Through these projects I grew an appreciation for everything Photoshop offers and I can’t wait to use it in the future for my projects and use these skills in the real world.
I really enjoyed the process of making this painting. I have always wished that I could be good at painting but never had the skills to do it on a regular canvas but Photoshop has opened the door for me to be able to create some really cool paintings. Although this is an easier way to paint, there are still many complexities about the process, finding the right medium and the exact color you want are still things you need to do on Photoshop. I could definitely see myself using this skill in the future. I can’t wait to have more projects that I can use this skill for.
Watercolor is such a relaxing form of art but I never felt I could create something I liked before because a lot of time real watercolor drips and you can’t get the exact stroke that you want. So being able to do it on photoshop and getting the same relaxing feeling but not having to be messy was awesome. For this project, I really wanted to create something that just represented where my head was at. Life has been stressful recently with college applications and a hard course load so just being able to relax and paint whatever came to mind was such a nice break. I ended up making a huge flower with a multi-color background. I love what I ended up with and I can’t wait to do more watercolor paintings in the future!
Something I think about a lot is how music has the power to take you back into your memories but can also make you focus on the present and the future. Everyone has different associations with songs and so I tried to portray how the sound waves of music can transcend everyone into a different memory/world. There are certain songs that when I hear them I am immediately put into a different place and I try to portray all the places that music takes me. For my world building project, an idea I had was to make people be able to time travel through listening to music and even though that is not exactly what my project came out to be I still wanted to focus on that idea in my Composition.
College Personal Essay
Something I love about Freestyle is how applicable every project we are given is. Starting senior year, many students including myself have a lot of anxiety about the college process and even starting to think about what you are going to write about on your Common Application. Luckily, Mr. Greco organizes a whole unit that is designate to writing a personal essay. I could not be more grateful for all the insight and feedback we got on this assignment because it helped me immensely in the college process and gave me a space to work in a productive enviornment. I also really enjoyed the self-reflection we got to do during this project. We were given a lot of mini assignments that were meant to help us identify things about ourselves, which I really loved because where else are you giving assignments to simply just get to know yourself?
Film
In Film, we were told to write a reflection that represented ourselves. This project at the beginning was very daunting because the prompt was so broad but after a lot of pondering I was able to land on a idea that I thought really screamed me. Without further ado, here is my reflections!
How I created this project was first I wrote my little essay, then I recorded it on a high quality audio recorder. After that I needed to decide what shots I wanted to get to put over my audio. I decided that I wanted to directly personify what I was saying so I got many different shots of what I was saying and edited them to make this video.
I really loved this project because we were given absolute creative freedom and I was able to create something that I felt really represented me and was something I could show people and be proud of.