The reflections unit at freestyle was the first unit of our senior year, and contained a wide variety of projects in our different classes. From the engraved mandala, to the personal essay, the projects in this unit all aim to answer the question “Who are you?”

During this unit, I learned a lot about different ways to represent who I am, such as through my personal taste, the stories I share, or the artworks I create

Personal Museum Curation

During the yearly field trip to SFMOMA, we were tasked with curating art pieces that we would add to a personal museum. We had to take three photos of art pieces we would add to the museum, and two photos of art pieces we would exclude from the museum. In English class, we gathered these photos and took some time to describe why we chose each piece, and what the pieces we chose say about our personal tase and values.

My Personal Mandalas

The personal mandala project was a multi-step project in Digital Media class. Using adobe illustrate, we set up templates that could create perfectly symmetrical mandalas of different sizes.

BW Mandala

Images not showing

If the images do not display below,
On a Mac, press Command + (plus) then press press Command – (minus)
On a PC, press the Ctrl + (plus) then press the Ctrl – (minus)

For this project, I created a black and white 10-slice mandala in Adobe Illustrate. To create the symmetry, I used a combination of techniques such as transformations and clipping masks. After setting up my 10-slice mandala template, I used a drawing tablet to create the illustration with a variety of different brushes. I decided to make a pizza board, since my family has a tradition of making pizzas for dinner every Sunday. Then, I tried to think of some things that represented myself as well as my family. I chose to base my mandala design off of cats, because our two cats are very important to us as a family. Cats are also very important to me personally, I even run a catsitting business in my spare time. I am very happy with how the final engraved mandala came out, I think the cat designs came out very well and the engraving captures the details nicely. I am very excited to bring it home to my family and get to use it.

I have a lot of experience using drawing tablets and pressure-sensitive brushes, but I’ve never really used them to draw with the brush tool in Adobe Illustrate before. Most of my Experience in Illustrate is with using the pen tool, so this was a very new experience for me. At first, I really struggled to draw, because the pen moved very quickly across the screen. I had to zoom in a lot and be very slow and careful with my lines in order to get the results I wanted. I had a lot of fun experimenting with the different brushes, and it’s not really something I’ve ever tried doing in Adobe Illustrate before. Overall, I think this experience helped me gain a better understanding of Adobe Illustrate, and it gave me a chance to work on being more careful and intentional when I draw. I think the best part of my BW Mandala is the cat illustrations I put throughout the layers, since I used the symmetry in many ways whether to make the cats themselves symmetrical, or to make them interact between slices.

---

Colored mandala

For this project, I created an 8-slice colored mandala in Adobe Illustrate. Even though I’m happy with how my BW mandala came out, I wanted to try something completely new for this project instead of just coloring my existing mandala. In my BW mandala, I experimented with making designs that looked like lace and really enjoyed it, so wanted to do that more in this mandala. I also wanted this mandala to represent my personal taste in terms of color and design elements, so I decided to base my design off of the clothing brand Angelic Pretty. Angelic Pretty is one of my favorite clothing brands, and I hope to be able to own one of their dresses some day. Their designs include a lot of lace, pastel colors, and cute drawings, so I incorporated all of those in my design.

Working with color was a lot more complicated than creating a black and white mandala, but it also meant I had more freedom. Like with the BW mandala, I started in the middle and moved outwards, but it involved a lot more going back and forth to adjust colors and order of layers. My process was pretty similar for each layer. I started with a basic circle in one of my colors, and then filled it in with a simple and repeated design such as bows or hearts. I also included a lace border on many of the edges. I really enjoyed replicating lace patterns, and I even created a custom pattern brush to use to help my workflow when drawing the lace. As opposed to the BW mandala, most of the drawings were done with the pen tool instead of the brush tool. I found this worked better because trying to fill shapes drawn with the brush tool can get complicated, but it’s very easy to create closed shapes with the pen tool. I think what stands out the most about my mandala is the illustrations I put in each layer. To me, they really bring together the style I was trying to emulate and make the overall mandala very colorful and interesting to look at.

---

The final step of the Mandala project was creating a video to show off our process of drawing it. We created a screen recording that slowly revealed each layer of the mandala, and turned it into a timelapse using After Effects. This was my first time using After Effects, so I used this assignment as an opportunity to get comfortable with it and try out a few important features such as keyframing.

Core Values Video

As an introduction to After Effects motion graphics, we used text animation presets to animate a quick video featuring our “core values.” Core values are something we used during our personal essay unit, and they are essentially the ideals that you value most.

Design

In Design class, our reflections unit consisted of a lot of different projects. The projects in this unit gave us the chance to represent ourselves and our interests in many different ways, while also getting the chance to learn some new things

---

Surreal Summer Collage

In case you were wondering, here is what each item in the collage represents

Cat -> I did a ton of catsitting over the summer

Statue of Liberty, roads, and train -> I went to New York for a few days with my family. I had been wanting to go for a while, and I had a lot of fun!

Jar and pickle fingernails -> My uncle gave me and my family a jar for making pickles, something I had really wanted to try out

Grass, trumpets -> Near the end of the summer, I had band camp for a week at my school. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice to get to meet all of the new members!

Paint palettes, children, paintbrush, and paint -> For the second summer in a row, I was a camp counselor at an arts and crafts summer camp

Sunscreen -> I was very diligent about wearing sunscreen, but I unfortunately still ended up with a pretty decent sunburn on the back of my legs

---

Aboriginal Art

Our next project was an exploration of aboriginal Australian art where symbols are used to tell a story. This artwork includes an animal that we chose to represent ourselves, symbols and constellations relating to our astrological sign, and multiple aboriginal artwork symbols of our choosing.

Artist statement

For this project, we were tasked with making an artwork in Photoshop in the Aboriginal Dreamtime style. The main focus of my artwork is the rat, which I chose because of how it represents me in many ways. Firstly, rats are very curious. I have always enjoyed learning new things, and I’m constantly asking questions to gain a better understanding of the world around me. Like a rat, I am also quite social and enjoy being around others. The rat has ram horns on its head, meant to represent my astrological sign, Taurus. The Taurus symbol is in the corners, and the constellation is featured in the background. Taurus is an earth sign, and I decided to tie this aspect in by adding lots of brown and earthy colors. The Aboriginal art style is very special in that it uses a variety of symbols to tell a story. I decided to tell some stories from my life using these symbols. For example, the brown circle in the top right represents a family gathering. In this circle, I used the campsite symbol to represent my Aunt and Uncles’ house. The symbol for fruits and flowers represents the garden, and the animal prints represent their dog. The entire circle resembles the aboriginal symbol for a star, because on that night we saw a very cool glowing trail in the sky. Throughout the entire artwork, I also used the symbols for clouds, rain, people sitting, and many more.

After learning about aboriginal art, I figured out my astrological sign, chose some symbols to incorporate, and decided on an animal to represent me. Then, I created a rough sketch of the artwork to get an idea of where certain things would go. I struggled to get started, but after looking at some past artworks from this project I was able to figure out how I wanted to incorporate dots into my idea to match the aboriginal style . One thing I struggled with was the placement of the constellation. At first, I lined the stars up with the corresponding parts of the rat, as they are on the ram seen in the constellation. However this covered a lot of the rat, and made the right side of the artwork too busy. Eventually, I decided to make it a bit more subtle and put it in the background. I think if I had more time to work on this project, I would want to go back and make the circle patterns smaller and more detailed, especially on the rat.

---

Concert Poster

The third reflections project we did in design class was the concert poster. We had to choose pre-2010s band and research it, as well as its genre. Then, we had to use the information we learned to create a theoretical concert they could have put on, including a venue and date. Finally, we used Adobe Illustrate to create the poster. The band I chose was Depeche Mode

Moodboard

First, we created a moodboard including fonts and colors to plan out our design

Final poster

Artist statement

Depeche mode is an English electronic/new wave band that was formed in 1980. Although they still exist today and released an album as recently as 2023, most of their success was found in the 1980s and 1990s during the British New Wave movement. New Wave is a category of pop music that takes inspiration from the punk and rock music of the 70’s. One characteristic of New Wave music is the use of synthesizers. Depeche Mode specifically experimented a lot with the synthesizer in their 1987 album “Music for the Masses”. In 1988, Depeche Mode performed to a crowd of 60,000 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl, and released the incredibly successful “Violator” album two years later in 1990. 

I started the poster making process by creating a moodboard. I looked at a ton of concert posters and album covers from Depeche Mode to figure out the styles they usually use. I also looked at concert posters from other bands of the same era. I decided on a primarily red monotone color palette with a little bit of a cream/beige color. Depeche mode uses a lot of roses in their designs, so I knew I wanted to include one. After doing more research on their history, I decided that I wanted my final poster to convey the success Depeche Mode found performing to a huge audience at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. 

I started by creating the graphic with the arm, megaphone, and rose. I took a stock photo of a hand holding a megaphone and traced over it using a few shades of red. I wanted the graphic to have a screen printed/stamped look, so I used a textured brush as for the stroke and later added some ink texture via transparency masks. I created the rose in the same way and placed it inside the megaphone. Next, I created the background. I typed out the lyrics to a few of their songs, and formatted them in various ways on different shades of beige. I added a few filters and used it as the background for the poster. To create the torn edges, I masked the same image over some rough shapes and added a drop shadow. Finally, I created the text displaying the details of the concert. I’m very happy with the result, and this process helped me explore a lot of illustrator features I’ve never used before such as transparency masks.