Personal Mandalas
The main assignment for Digital Media was making personal mandalas that showed your ideals and personality in them. I used the main motifs of the sun, butterflies, and eyes in order to represent beauty, change, and perception.
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For this project, I made a black and white mandala with sun and butterly motifs throughout the drawing. I used a variable brush stroke to add variance to my lines and maually changed the stroke width to make a gradient of stroke width. Using the variable brush was really fun, I would definitely go more in-depth on making my own in the future. I also purposefully used sharp lines for almost everything to create a general theme. When making my mandala, I made sure to inclue a lot of radial points to represent the sun. I think that the sun represents beauty, light, and truth, all of which I value a lot. I also included butterflies that represent growth from the past and change, and the last thing I added were eyes, which represent the viewing of my other included values as well as the appreciation of those things. I definitely confirmed that while making art, I need a bit of time to make sure everything is agreeable before submission, but I love what I put out. I also confirmed that I love and am technichally skilled at using Adobe Illustrator. I think that overall the best part of my mandala is the largest sun halo, I think its lines a really clean and I love it. I also really like the butterflies on the outside because I had to move each one individually and resize it to make each one unique, which made it look really good in the end.
I made a version of my black and white mandala but coloured it. I made sure to make the sun motifs very clear by having a dark background and bright yellow and orange mandala. I also added a circular gradient to make the mandala seem like it was glowing. I wanted to show how bright the sun in my mandala was, and I think I succeeded. I also made the butterflies both blend into the background by having a lighter shade of it and also show the idea of growth by growing lighter like the sun. I also made the eyes around the center darker and the center one lighter to show how they are viewing something bright without being bright themselves. When adding colour, some of my lines didn’t connect so I had to brush underneath the lines to make it filled. I think it was pretty fun to make it come to life in a really relaxing way. The thing that stands out the most is definitely the main sun. The gradient adds a lot and it stands out really well. I think that I did pretty solidly emphasising what I wanted to emphasise by using colour and line thickness.
I also made a time lapse of my mandala’s balck and white version being made by hiding and revealing layers one by one. I initially made a screen recording, then added a title, colours, and music in Adobe After Effects for the first time. Learning After Effects was pretty fun, and my product was also pretty cool!
When I saw the final laser engraved mandala, I was really impressed. It looked really good in gold and the black lines contrased really well with the gold. I also liked that when the sun hit it, it reflected a really strong light straight into my eyes. It aso seemed to glow mre or less golden based on how much light there was, which looked really cool. My whole main theme was a sun, so having the gold plastic shine so brightly definitely was the right idea.
Throughout this whole project, I had a lot of fun using the tool I was most comfortable with and making something that represented myself in a creative way. Using Adobe Illustrator was really fun, and trying out brushes like the pressure sensitive ones invited really interesting design possibilities. Making the build video was also fun because I was able to learn how to use Adobe After Effects for the first time, which was also pretty interesting. Seeing the video of my mandala being printed was also really cool. I’m really proud of my ability to convey a theme through a design, as well as my technical skill in making the piece look good. I’m also proud of my decision making and how when something didn’t work, I was flexible enough to pivot to a different idea. In the future I want to use the pressure brushs in Illustrator more since they were so fun to work with. I also want to use this experience to make better designs that tell stories just like how this piece reflects my life in its design.
Art Curation for Personal Museum
The art curation assignment was basically to take photos of our three favourite art pieces and two least favourite art pieces during out SFMOMA field trip. When explaining why we would or wouldn’t include them in out curation, we needed to explain out personal preferences and taste, like or dislike of the concept, and any personal meaning pieces might have to us. I was personally looking for pieces that would draw attention, look beautiful, have a meaningful concept behind it, and show connected themes with itself and each other.
3 Included Pieces
2 Excluded Pieces
When looking at pieces at the SFMOMA, I think it reflects my values as an artist and how I’ve grown. When making art, I try to make something look beautiful or interesting, even if it comprimises the initial intended meaning. Most of the art pieces I chose to include are beautiful, even in their own way. The bridge is just a beautiful installation, the candles glowing is vibrant, and the violins are smooth, even if they made destructive sounds. On the other hand, the pieces I didn’t choose were bland in visual interest but beautiful in meaning, to an extent. I think that this curation really shows how I value beauty over integrity of values, which also makes me think that I should try to stick to my orginal designs more to prevent myself from compromising that meaning.
Digital Collages
The Digital Collage assignment was to cut and compile photos we took ourselves and found online to create a surreal composition. I wanted to use my summer as some inspiration since I took photos there, so I used the mountains as a base. I then wanted to add a fantastical element, so I made the water reflecting the sky in the air and the sky on the floor. I chose to make boats move through the sky on the floor to make it more surreal and add a unique element. Since the theme I wanted to follow was an endless journey, I made a hand paint stars into the sky which then caught the boats chasing the hand. This is a well edited surreal composition that I’m pretty proud of.
The second part of the assignment was to illustrate the surreal composition in Adobe Illustrator. Since my original composition used so many low opacity layer stacking, colour shifting, and unique shading, I couldn’t make a good illustrated version of it, so I low-key gave up and put more time into the other two versions.
The final step was to recreate our composition using Illustrator’s AI tools. This was incredibly challenging since the AI had a very specific opinion of what certain words meant, so I couldn’t make my composition effectively only using AI. Because of this, I decided to edited the AI images and compile them to create my surreal composition.
This project took so long and was only really interesting at the beginning. I wanted to learn how to edit and create myself, not use AI to create crappy knockoffs I had to edit to make look good anyways. My actual composition was incredibly successful, and I’m very hapy with it, but I wish Illustrator made it easier to use brushes to create that colorful mixed sky instead of only having gradients. I also think my AI version looks decent for AI, so it’s kinda horrible. None of the textures, colors, and styles work with each other, and I wish that I’d been able to perfect my Photoshop composition instead of working on this.
Concert Poster
This assignment was to research a 1900s music artist and create a concert poster for them. It was to include aspects of the time period, but also innovate and create new ideas and space for an old artist. I chse Dinah Shore, a pop singer from the 1940s who used the radio to sing. She became popular for her song I’ll Walk Alone, which was at the top of the billboard charts for 26 weeks. This song inspired many people during the war, and was the main reason I chose to make a poster for her.
For my mood board, I wanted to include aspects from Dinah Shore’s time period, like the close up portrait photos, the tall text in many posters at the time, and a unique cel shading art style. I initially wanted to include warm colours to make her feel bright, but changed that throughout my process to make her more dramatic. I also wanted to try adding a path, referencing I’ll Walk Alone, but decided it created too much visual clutter.
My concert poster is from the 1940s, when music artists were newly transitioning into jazz music. The artist I made a poster for, Dinah Shore, made primarily pop music with minor jazz undertones in many of her songs, the jazz influence growing around the 1950s. She began singing on the radio in 1939 and became a featured vocalist by 1940. Her first hit single, I’ll Walk Alone, was about the struggles women went through during World War 2, and because of the shared sentiment many people had, was in the top 10 songs on the Billboard Charts for 26 weeks. Because of this hit song, she was able to be a prevalent figure on the radio and even did some concerts during her peak singing years. Later in life, she hosted TV shows such as Dinah’s Place, and later, Dinah!. Dinah Shore was an incredibly successful singer who used the tools around her such as the radio and television to spread her voice, fame, and message, which is why I decided to make a poster about her.
I made my poster by first tracing a photo of Dinah Shore singing in a cell-shading style, and then added more shadows and details not in the original image. I used the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to make smooth shapes, and decided to use a small amount of texture to make it feel more like an illustration than a print or photo. After drawing Dinah Shore, I was trying to come up with ideas for what else to add, and figured that since she held a top 10 spot on the Billboard Charts for so long, she could be a ‘queen’ of music in her time, so I gave her a crown. The most challenging part was figuring out the typography, since I was trying to emulate an older style I wasn’t familiar with. In the end, I put Dinah Shore’s name inside the crown and the rest of the fake concert information like venue, date, and time on the bottom of her dress. I think that the most interesting part of this project was doing the research, I definitely learned a lot about someone I didn’t know much about before, and that’s really fun! I wish I’d done a bit more work on giving my illustration some texture, like a light blush or a more detailed crown, but the simplified look still feels clean to me.
Aboriginal Art
Th aboriginal art assignment was to replicate a sepcific style including stippling using Adobe Illustrator. We also had to include traditional aboriginal symbols, a constellation or star sign, and a spirit animal. I personally found the actual project enjoyable, but wish I could’ve done it about something other than spirit animals and star signs, becuase I find them fake and innaccurate. Despite this, I think the product was good.
In my aboriginal art, I used the main symbols of water, arrows, and snakes as traditional aboriginal symbols. Since I also decided to use snakes as a spirit animal, it worked out well. The other main part was adding my zodiac constellation, Sagittarius, and my element, fire. Throughout the piece I wanted to use the fire, constellation, and arrows to represent fate or a predetermined outcome that was being enforced on normal people, so I used my spirit animal, the snakes, as the representation of people. I made the water represent the mortal plane as to directly contrast the stars and fire of the divine constellation. As the snakes are shot by the arrows made of stars, I imagine that they don’t die, but become part of the original intention for fate rather than acting as they were and defying it. Sagittarius is a symbol of predetermined fate enforcing that fate on others. I first got this idea when we got the project and were told to use our zodiac signs. I didn’t want to, and it felt like I was being forced into a role I had no choice in, similar to how people are born into zodiac signs rather than them being based on actions.
Making this piece was incredibly similar to stippling, but way more fun. I used Adobe Photoshop to make layers of dots over solid colours, which created depth and satisfying patterns. Another major quality of life upgrade compared to physical stippling is that I was able to change the brush size and make solid background colours, which let me do large swathes of colour easily. I initially tried adding borders to my snakes and fire, but it looked really unclean and ugly with them on, so I used a selection of each area I was colouring to make clean edges. For the constellation and arrows, I added a glowing effect by adding a white border on the outside and making ti fade out with dots. I think that overall, my process was similar for each part, which was mainly making a solid background, then a base layer of dots, then dots on that for more depth. Even though it was repetitive, using different colours and techniques for the divine and mortal halves made this piece really fun and interesting to make.
