The reflections unit has given me an opportunity to reflect upon my own beliefs, and through this, strengthen my beliefs as well. From the different intertwining projects in English, Digital Media, and Design, I’ve been able to fully explore and investigate my own morals create products from these ideas. This unit has been impactful to me as both a person and an artist, as it helped me solidify who I am as a person and what values I carry with me.
This I Believe
In English class, we wrote essays called “This I Believe”. The purpose of these essays is to pick something that you strongly believe in, and write about why this is something you stand for. After reading many examples, I chose to write my essay about gratefulness. In Digital Media, we connected our essays with video production. Using After Effects, I learned how to effectively use this program to visualize my essay. For this, I decided to change my This I Believe essay slightly and make the angle more about nature. Although i shifted the perspective to nature, the overarching theme of gratefulness is still present.
My essay and video:
Happiness Through Gratitude
I believe in the power of gratitude—you cannot be truly happy if you aren’t grateful for the things around you. In a world filled competition and jealousy, gratefulness keeps me grounded. I remember my dad telling me this when I was living in Finland; We lived in a small one story townhouse with me, my parents, and my three siblings. My mom sewed most of my clothes and eating out at a restaurant was a rare occasion saved for birthdays and other special days. We didn’t have the most flamboyant lifestyle, but I was completely happy. Every night before bed, my dad would encourage us to think of three things that we were grateful for that day. This became a habit, and I’ve been doing it for years now.
Then, at nine years old, my life completely changed when my dad took his job to the United States. Our environment changed, and our lifestyles changed evermore. I was suddenly living in a two-story house with a pool, taking tennis lessons, and buying clothes from Gap. In short, I had more. For a second, it felt like I had more to be grateful for. I had exposure to opportunities that I didn’t when I was living in Finland. It would make sense—the more you have, the more you have to be grateful for. But, I think this is a skewed way of thinking, and it didn’t take me long to realize that when I moved here. Just because my family could now afford more, that didn’t make these new things any more valuable than what I was grateful for back in Finland. If anything, they were less important.
The little things, like playing on the swings with my older sister or ice skating with my mom are the times that I was, and still am, most grateful for. The moments that I shared with the people I love, rather than something materialistic. Of course I’m still grateful for the new opportunities I’m given by living in the US, but in a different sense. As I kept growing up, the importance of gratitude only strengthened. I see people corrupt with power and money who are blind to everything they should be grateful for.
For me, gratefulness allows me to recognize all the good in my life. By highlighting the good moments and being aware of everything I have, I’ve been just as happy with my lifestyle in Finland as I am with my lifestyle in California. It can be easy to take things for granted, but in order to really be truly content, I have to acknowledge all the good that happens daily.
Mandala Production
In Digital Media, we produced mandalas as one of the Reflections Unit projects. For this, I used illustrator to create my mandala. A mandala is meant to be delicate and precise, and creating it was almost a therapeutic act. I incorporated elements of nature in my mandala to connect with my Perspective Opinion video. Using After Effects, I also created a mandala build-reveal video to show my process.
Final Mandala
Photoshop Painting
Another Digital Media project for this unit was learning how to paint on photoshop. This was one of my first times using the painting feature in Photoshop, and I really enjoyed it. Although I completed this project pretty fast, I hope to give myself more time in the future to paint on Photoshop and create something really cool.
College Personal Essay
In English class, one of our assignments was to write our Common Application essays, or the personal essay. Since I had already written my essay for the Common App, I decided to challenge myself and choose a University of Chicago prompt to write another personal essay. I chose the prompt “create your own idiom” because I thought this was a unique and interesting idea to write about. Instead of really creating my own idiom, I twisted the well-known idiom “curiosity killed the cat”.
Curiosity Saved the Cat
I’ve always been bothered by the saying, “curiosity killed the cat”.
While I understand the meaning behind this idiom and its warning against being too investigative, I don’t think this is the message we should spread about curiosity. It sheds light on curiosity in a negative way, making it seem like being curious is something you should be wary of, therefore pushing people away from the idea of staying curious.
I say this not because I think curiosity can literally save someone’s life, but I think it can save it in a sense that makes life worth living. Without curiosity, we lack the drive to experiment on new things and to push ourselves out of the protection of our comfort zones. Curiosity paves the path for excitement and to finding answers to thought-provoking questions, ultimately expanding the mind.
Personally, I’ve always been curious about art. I’ve been mixing paints with my hands since I was three years old, with the help of my artist grandmother. Although I’ve spent my life surrounded by art in almost all forms imagenable, I’ve struggled to find my own voice within art. It was my curiosity and search for my own artistic expression that led me to join Freestyle Academy. Freestyle is a unique, two-year program designed for juniors and seniors interested in a more focused art and technology curriculum. I initially hesitated joining because it would restrict the amount of APs I would be able to take and took time away from being on my STEM-driven high school campus. In the end, my curiosity and passion for what this program could help me discover about myself deemed more valuable than succumbing to the AP culture on my high school campus. I’ve never regretted this decision.
After taking Design and Digital Media for over a year now, I’ve learned how I can apply my skills in various different ways: illustration, web design, product design, music production and video production. With its small classroom size, my Design class has offered me a hands-on education driven by my creative freedom and provided me with tools to produce work that I’m proud to call mine.
Freestyle has completely changed my high school experience; instead of suppressing my curiosity, I feel encouraged to use it to inspire my own work and create self-driven projects within a close community of peers who share the same interests, passions and worldviews as me. I’ve been given an artistic platform where I can express myself and the overly-working nature of the right side of my brain. Simply put, Freestyle saved my high school career.
This is not to say that curiosity can’t be detrimental; but there is a difference between curiosity for your own benefit and being overly-obsessed with something or someone. For me, my curiosity keeps me alive. It drives my passion and opens up opportunities that I might not otherwise have had I not let my curiosity take the wheel.
Public Service Announcement
In Design class, our major assignment for this unit was to create a PSA on something we strongly believe in. For mine, I wanted to create a poster about the importance of leaving the comfort zone. I created my PSA using Adobe Illustrator.
Artist Statement:
My PSA is about the importance of leaving the comfort zone. I believe that taking risks and following your curiosity often requires a little bit of discomfort, but that this discomfort allows us to grow as people and can lead to amazing things. I wanted to represent this idea through the term “pop the bubble”. To illustrate this, I created bubbles with little people inside them to represent the entrapment of the comfort zone. I made these bubbles slightly smaller and the people inside them in grey/toned down colors to express how staying in the comfort zone and being too scared to escape it can lead to a boring, dull lifestyle. In the center of my illustration, I have a larger person with a broken bubble around them. I wanted it to stand out and seem more lively than the people trapped inside the bubbles. This is intended to represent the excitement and thrill that can come from experiencing what is outside of the comfort zone. The color scheme I used was mostly orange and purple because I think these two colors complement each other effectively and generate a nice sense of contrast.
I created my PSA using Adobe Illustrator. I heavily used the circle shape tool, pen tool, paint brush tool, and gradient effects to make my illustration come to life. I also chose to make the background black in order to make the bubbles pop out. One major struggle I had was deciding how I wanted to represent the broken bubble. It’s difficult to create an illustration of a realistic broken bubble because it requires very miniscule detail that is hard to achieve using Illustrator. In the end, I decided that it would look better to make the broken bubble more illustrative and simple rather than focusing on making it extremely detailed. Since the other aspects of my illustration aren’t necessarily very realistic either, I think the way I represented the broken bubble works well in my PSA. I had a fun time creating this project and I’m happy with the outcome of my final PSA illustration.