Reflections

Introduction to Reflections Project

Art Curation for Personal Museum

fjnksintroduce art curation project Art Curation Project briefly explaining where you took photos. Which works of art are worthy of my attention? What matters to me? Describe how the way you curate your personal art museum is a reflection of your taste that would answer “Who am I?

How has your own work as an artist and your own criticism of your artwork influenced your choices about which pieces made your Personal Museum and which pieces didn’t make the cut?”

My Personal Mandalas

This project was to make a series of mandala related creations, ranging from digital to physical. The aim was to explore the process of making a mandala, while also creating an artwork that reflected a piece of myself. The first step was to create a black and white mandala design on adobe illustrator in a radial arrangement. After that, I converted that black and white design into color by creating gradient and color blocks behind the line work. Then both of those designs were printed on different materials, and I took photos of them. After that, I created a video revealing the each layer of the colored digital mandala.

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My reaction to seeing my mandala was that it was just as cluttered as I had wanted it to be. I really enjoyed making a picture that had so many things to take in, and I was really happy with it. I did notice that the colors on the engraved version were a little less vibrant than the ones on my digital version, but that wasn’t something I cared about that much. Otherwise, the engraved version matched my digital artwork pretty well. I chose to use silver plastic for my black and white engraved mandala, and everyone in the class ended up using MDF sublimation for the colored engraved mandala. I chose the silver plastic because it was shiny, but neutral in color, and I wanted the design to stand out differently when light hit it in different ways. I also just like how it looks.

Altogether, I think the whole process of creating the mandalas, from the digital black and white version and colored version, to the video and the physical engraved versions, was a very up-and-down process. I had a lot of fun with the creating of the designs, but I struggled with the video and the photo taking, but I also learned a lot. I learned how much time it takes to make a video like that, and also how to rotate things on illustrator in a radial pattern. I learned about how I like to do my designs differently than others, and how to make lines interact in a more efficient way on illustrator. I was unable to make the pressure sensitive brushes work on illustrator, but I wasn’t planning on using them in my design anyway, so I will have to learn how to do that in the future.

Overall, I am most proud of my colored design, and how all of the parts of the show I love are combined in a cohesive way. I learned many valuable skills on illustrator and after effects, and I am excited to use those skills more in the future. I plan to use what I learned about radial copying on illustrator to make more dynamic designs for posters and other merchandise in future theatre productions and for clubs I take part in, and it is always useful to learn more about digital art creation. This project allowed me to see how each one of my classmates thinks about a project differently, and how their interests impact the things they create. I value others’ artwork more because of how unique every single creation is.

I created a colored version of my black and white mandala using illustrator. This mandala differs from my BW mandala because My Little Pony is full of such fun and whimsical colors, and in this mandala, I am able to replicate that. Even the themes of the show served to bring light to my life, so my representation should aim to do the same. When I saw what got printed, I was pretty happy with the result. Everything looked pretty good and it all turned out fine, but I thought about how the printing colors were different from the screen colors, and how I might be able to fix that next time, perhaps by choosing more vibrant colors to begin with.

Since I was going with a stained glass inspiration for the shapes, I also wanted the colors to be as vibrant as possible, so I tried to use gradients and varied colors to make it look as if light was actually coming out of the image. This also would match the theme of the work being centered around Celestia, whose job it is to bring light to the ponies of Equestria. I don’t really feel like I succeeded in making it look lit up, but I did try to make it as close as possible. Working with color required thinking more about the connections of the lines I was making. In black and white, the points don’t actually have to connect, they just have to get close enough that they overlap a bit. With color, in order to fill the spaces I wanted, I needed to connect the endpoints of the lines perfectly so that colors wouldn’t bleed into each other. The colors were a lot harder to do with a pen, so for this mandala, I switched to mainly using a trackpad, since it brought more accuracy.

I like works that are visually appealing and that have a bunch of little easter eggs in them, so this project was really fun, as I got to hide a bunch of those all around. This mandala was something I was able to work on outside of school, and in the little moments between classes, which made it easier to get the physical thing done. I would like to try to immerse myself more in the meaning behind projects and attempt to use that to make myself complete them faster.

Mandala Build Reveal video

After completing the colored mandala digitally, the next step was to create a process reveal video for the mandala, in order to show each individual layer that made up the final product. We did this using screen-recording and the revealing of each layer one by one, and you can see the final video below.

This entire process of making each part of the mandala was a very intense learning experience. I had a lot of struggles but the end result was one that I was very happy with. I learned to create radial patterns in illustrator, how to do some coding for this website, and how to edit a video in after effects. If I were to do this again, I would be able to improve in a lot of ways, but the result that I do have is evidence of the things I’ve learned.