Introduction
The Reflections unit was meant to help us consider the question “Who am I?” and how to express that through artistic and written mediums. In Digital Media, we created personal mandalas and learned how to make art in Photoshop. Our English class had us write personal essays, and Animation began to explore creating characters and movement in a 3D space. Overall, this unit was a lot of fun, though challenging, and eye-opening in a lot of aspects.
Mandalas
The Mandala project was one of our first projects that we did this school year. They were meant to be personal in some way, but as I tried drawing them with that lens, I found that forcing it just didn’t work. I went through multiple drafts, but the ones that stuck weren’t the ones with a particular theme, but rather the ones where I was just having a lot of fun drawing and coming up with interesting shapes.
My first mandala started as just doodling until I found something interesting. There wasn’t a whole bunch of direction for it until I came the the realization that the part that I had just drawn reminded me a lot of stained glass. My mind made the connection of stained glass to castles and who lives in castles, but royalty. Royalty wear crowns and tiaras and those happen to be excellent for pattern inspiration. That ended up spawning the rest of my mandala and I am extremely pleased with how it came out. It was also awesome to see this mandala getting engraved. Seeing a physical representation of my work was one of the best feelings in the world. Taking this photo was an exercise in patience, but I think that that it turned out well too.
My second mandala was a colored mandala. My plan going into this mandala was doing something with the concept of “iridescence”. I used a color palette with soft bright colors and a dark background, attempting to create an oil effect, but the end result ended up looking more like a flower. Though it was not my original vision, I think I like this version even more and the final product was very worth it.
Photoshop Art
Photoshop is one of my favorite programs, but I largely used it for photo touch ups and animation. The most complicated that I went in drawing on Photoshop were the backgrounds for my animations. This unit really advanced my skills and I had a lot of fun doing all of these projects and putting them together. I loved being able to create visual pieces for a few months straight.
The Photoshop Pastel Project was an adventure. I loved doing a more complicated piece in photoshop. When I started, I knew that I wanted to do something more mystical and fantasy inspired, so I immediately searched for a reference photo that involved fantasy photography and ended up settling on a photo taken by Grace Almera. There was a lot of trial and error involved with painting this, especially the clothing, as I figured out what worked and what didn’t for photoshop painting. I am overall really proud of the result, even if there are a few tweaks I would like to have here and there.
The watercolor painting project was very difficult. I have attempted watercolor as a physical medium, and doing it digitally was even harder. This photo was based off a photo of the beautiful Utah landscape and though I don’t think I gave it perfect justice, this was a very fun project to do. I am pretty happy with how it came out, but I was definitely limited by my lack of ability and familiarity with watercolor to make it what I truly wanted it to look like.
We also ventured into the world of using filters to create a water color effect. In the beginning, I had to mess around with the filter a lot to make it look coherent and not disjointed, but once I figured out how the effect worked, it became a lot of fun. Photoshop allowed for a lot of additional fine tuning and that was probably my favorite part of the project. I could see that my photos looked good and then tweak things to make them look even better.
In this unit, we learned the fabled “photoshopping” ability through compositions. We learned how to blend photos, use layer masks, and adjust hues to make photos composited together look like they were always meant to be there. My first early attempts were not amazing as I was still unused to using this skill, but it was awesome to learn the skill that you always hear about when it comes to Photoshop.
Our final photoshop project was to create a surreal composition that was meant to be part of our world building project. In my world, Mithraz (the main antagonist) did not start out as a villain. He was never a paragon of virtue, but he had goals and he wasn’t the villain he would become. His road to becoming the world’s enemy took time, but the turning point was when he destroyed all of the progress in understanding runes. This scene is of Mithraz staring at the burning laboratory as he makes the choice that he can’t return from. This was a very fun project, though one of the more difficult ones. Finding high quality elements that matched the vision I had in my head was hard, as was trying to make it one cohesive piece, but I am very happy with how it turned out. Composition is probably one of the coolest skills I have learned in Freestyle.
Personal Essay
We did our personal essay in English as preparation for writing college essays. I didn’t end up using this as any of my college essays, but the skills I learned in writing this were very helpful for writing my actual essays. For this project, I did a lot of brainstorming into what my core values were and what was important to me. This project was really the pinnacle of the “Who am I?” question. A lot of this was very uncomfortable, and this process brought back a lot of things that I would have preferred to ignore forever. Despite the discomfort that comes with learning yourself, I am grateful for this project.
Animation
This year in animation, we began our venture into 3D animation. We learned how to use Maya, Z-Brush, and Adobe 3D Substance Painter to model, render, and animate our creations. The virtual 3D space has definitely been a learning curve to explore. All of these programs were brand new, and I didn’t understand anything at the beginning. Once I began to get the hang of it, this began to be very fun and I loved to make characters, props, and worlds into something real.
In order to learn how to use each of these programs, we had various assignments and tasks to create props before we started doing our actual projects. Our first modeling project in maya was the table scene. This was an adventure to try and figure out at first. As someone who has been using a lot of Adobe products, the Maya and Autodesk seemed very unintuitive. We used the skull and character head project to learn how to use Z-Brush, which was somehow harder to learn. I eventually got the hang of the hot keys and moving around in a virtual 3D space, and I am glad that I did because that was important for my next projects.
Our next major project was creating a weapon. I attempted to make Gimli’s axe from the lord of the rings movies, but when that wasn’t working out, I decided to re-create a sword from one of my favorite book series, Way of Kings. This project was an interesting one to tackle as there were a lot of complicated shapes to create and a lot of places for error. I ended up redoing my project one more time because my model didn’t come out as well as I would have liked when I got to the Substance Painter portion and I felt like I could do it better. I am really happy with how my final sword turned out, and I think it looks awesome.
The character modeling project was probably one of the most difficult things I have done at Freestyle. I drew my concept for my character, Max the Barista, and began to model him. This model took multiple attempts as I figured out how to make my model cleaner and what worked for what. The progression from cube to human was an interesting one and a lot of the steps were “Trust the Process” moments. When I got him into Z-Brush, it was amazing to see how it was actually coming together and how I crafted a literal human. This model was awesome to build, and despite the tweaks I would have made with my later rigging perspective, I am proud of him.