Reflections

Introduction to Reflections Project

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My Personal Mandalas

When I saw my laser engraved mandala, it was really satisfying to have such a final project. However, the streaks in the wood made it harder to see my design so it was a slight let down, but overall, it matched pretty well with my digital artwork. I chose the pizza board because it was the most interesting product to have in my opinion and I can display it in more unique ways and I can actually use it.

My reflection on the entire project is that I am glad I did this because it was very different from what I normally do. Trying to figure out a good design by only working with a small amount of area on the canvas was a challenge as whatever I drew would reflect on the rest of the canvas. I am most proud of my colored mandala because I think it looked the best and had more fun coloring in all of the different animals and layers of the ocean. I will use the technical skills I learned for making the templates and patterns. I normally don’t appreciate the reflecting style artworks as I thought it took less effort. But after playing around with it I found it difficult to make a coherent pattern and design in a small slice of my canvas.

Art Curation

This project took us back to the SF MoMA where this time, as seniors, we were asked to find art instillations that best reflected our style and would put into our own museum, but also find some pieces we would purposefully exclude.

As an illustration and graphic design more focused artist, I tend to spy the works that inspire those kinds of fields in me. Not all works will mimic that, but I like order and understanding in my art. The pieces that do not make the cut are the ones that seem pointless and effortless. They do not represent practicality or skill which is generally what I like to see.

Core Values Video

This project was an introduction into the complex program that is Adobe After Effects. I learned the basics of text and shape manipulation and I had a lot of fun animating transitions between my core value words.

Design

Surreal Summer

In this project for Design, I was tasked with creating a surreal composition that took aspects from my summer and put them together in an appealing but unreal way. We used Photoshop for the images, then Illustrator to create solid shapes, then we prompted AI to create the last image based off of our description of the previous art pieces.

Concert Poster

This project was a lot of fun as I was assigned to pick a music artist and create a concert poster in the style of their era. I chose Frank Sinatra in his early years as a Crooner, so roughly 1940s. I used Illustrator to image trace a photo I found on the internet and added some era appropriate text to give it the final touches.

Frank Sinatra’s younger years were around the 1930s and 40s during the Great Depression and Second World War. During this time there started to be the Red Scare which Frank was also involved in as he joined several celebrity and Hollywood groups standing against the blacklisting of Hollywood and the music industry from the HUAC.
My genre is Pop with a sub genre of Oldies/traditional pop, but particularly in Sinatra’s younger years his genre was considered to be more crooner.
I created this poster by doing some slight photo manipulation in Adobe Photoshop by cutting out backgrounds and then putting them into Adobe Illustrator to do an “image trace” to vectorize the image. I then added era appropriate typefaces to add the artist’s name, time and place to mimic the concert posters of that time. I learned that it would be more difficult to create this poster than I originally thought because I would have to research the concert posters of the 1940s and see how they designed them. It was significantly less interesting than modern posters so some of my creativity was taken away but it was still fun to try and create a similar poster that might have been seen during that era. I would change how I approached the entire design by maybe adding some more graphic design elements with drawn elements, and if I had to do it again, I would want to lean into more modern designs.

Aboriginal Art

In this assignment, I studied ancient African designs to create my own aboriginal artwork based off of my own star signs, symbols and animal of my choosing. I used Photoshop to hand draw everything, and while tedious at first, was relaxing in a sort of zen way.

My symbols were the cloud, campfire, and star. I used the clouds as a background texture underneath the pangolin, and mountains. I used stars as a part of my constellation symbol which is Aries. I used the campfires in the corners of my painting. This piece represents my building of skills represented by the pangolin’s shells and ability to be calm in accordance with Aries’ supposed fiery tempers. I first started with the pangolin, making the shells was a lot of fun but tedious because doing all the individual dots was difficult while also making sure each shell was distinct. Then for the background that was the most difficult part for me trying to add all of the symbols in a normal way that didn’t stick out and take away from the main focus. I decided to play more into my color palette and have variations of tones and shadows to give a more earthy feel. I would make the constellation a little dimmer next time and the outline of the pangolin brighter.