Reflections

Intro

For this last unit at Freestyle we focused on reflecting on ourselves and who we are. and the uniqueness of ourselves as individuals. Through English, Animation and Digital Media, I was able to express myself and my interests through the art I created. With each project I was able to show a part of who I was, whether it was the topic of my writing, the paintings I did in photoshop, or the 3D sculpting and design for animating. Through all these different projects I learned more about myself when it came to my creativity and personal preferences for how to do art (such as preferring to draw from scratch rather than programming something to look a certain way). I also found more music genres while working on all these projects that I hadn’t known about beforehand that I honestly truly enjoy now.

Personal Mandala

One of the first projects in this Unit was to create personal mandalas. Within Illustrator, each of us practiced and attempted to perfect the process of setting up the right features to create our Mandalas, and then drawing them using different number of sided mandalas: 10, 12, 14, and 16. This was probably one of my favorite projects since there was so much creative freedom for everyone to draw and create whatever they wanted. These were my final products.

For this project I had a lot of fun with it, I was able to kinda just draw randomness and see it turn into a really cool looking pattern which I enjoyed. I think if I were to do this again I would try to spend more time making the drawings more intricate and more detailed. As much as I like the mandalas I made, the red one specifically could have been done with a lot more detailed images. For my black and white mandala I probably would’ve tried to think of a concept or general idea of what I was trying to make beforehand rather than just going in and drawing whatever for funzies. As for the reveal video I most likely would’ve preferred it if I started working on it sooner and just gotten it out of the way rather than waiting for the last day before it is due.

Some things I appreciated about the mandala projects is how much work a good detailed mandala takes to make. Trying to set up the clipping mask and lines to set up the layout before beginning as well as making the images for the mandala isn’t extremely hard but it can be a bit tedious and takes time and focus. Also when it came to making the mandala, I really appreciated how I didn’t need to do perfect drawings to make something creative. For a while now I have had writers and artist blocks (idk if artist block is a thing, if it is I am currently having it) and the mandalas allowed me to make something creative without needing to create an entirely new drawing concept.

I think something I learned about myself is even though I have been struggling to be creative for four almost five months now that I can still do it, and that my creative side isn’t really gone, it’s just a lot more stuck than usual. Also just realize how much I miss my best friend who died. I mean I know how much I miss them but I really miss them. One of my favorite parts of my mandalas is that each has pieces of him in there, of stuff he used to draw on me, the date of his death, or I just listened to music we would rock out to together while making this. Overall I just really liked this project, it helped me a bit.

Photoshop Art

The following few projects of the Reflections unit were using Adobe Photoshop. There were many different ways in which to use the software, so I found it a sometimes challenging, but fun way to create art digitally. I really valued the time it took to create the art. Sometimes it would take shorter time then just drawing on paper, other times it would take me forever to get a mediocre looking piece done. All in all, it gave me a greater appreciation for digital art and digital artists.

My experience for this project was really enjoyable. I was very happy with getting to listen to music and virtually paint in class every day. It was just an overall generally simple and very relaxing project for me to do. The only not relaxing part was I forgot to add another layer and was drawing on the background itself and so I had to delete that and start over. But besides that mishap, I think this project was a great success.

One thing I valued for sure was using Photoshop in a way that is my preferred medium to use. What I mean by that is is that we were using photoshop to draw and paint creative things. I personally am a not great photographer, so using a photo and painting it is something I enjoy more than just editing photos.

I learned a way that I can more enjoy and also use Photoshop better. With the learning how to paint in Photoshop, I gained a better understanding of the software. In addition, I was able to enjoy painting a photo I found relatively beautiful and relaxing. I really enjoyed this project, and I am very excited to try out water color next:)

The real story of this painting is I had no idea what I wanted to draw. No matter how hard I thought about it, a specific idea for a watercolor painting was not coming to mind. I don’t really ever do watercolor, like ever. I think the one time I have gone out of my way to paint something in watercolor was an english project and sophomore year and I thought mine turned out horrible. So I instead just tried sketching images of parts of a face because I didn’t really know what else to do. And it in my opinion looks not terrible.

For me this painting holds a kind of memory since it reminds me of when I was in middle school and I would attempt to “master” drawing the different parts of the face. I was that one kid who drew eyes all over her papers in class (it was probably really creepy but whatever), and so me doing this with water color is very much a reminder of that. I still am not exactly perfect at it, but its still a fun thing for me to draw.

One of the main things I valued about this assignment, is that it was very drawing based. This and the pastel painting project we did previously are both some of my favorite projects because it is just sitting down every day in class, listening to music, and drawing something. It’s not super complex but it is very relaxing to me since drawing and listening to music is my happy place in life. ANALOG painting will always have my heart because it’s what I grew up practicing how to do it. Digital painting makes some parts a lot quicker : getting the brush size you want, being able to just undo your mistakes, shade of color you want , which I greatly appreciate. But I also enjoy taking those few extra minutes trying to find the exact paint brush size in my bin of brushes, mixing paints together to try to make the perfect shade I see in my mind. The little moments I have to do these things I enjoy because its part of an art process I have always had. And I missed those moments, although this was very fun.

In general there isn’t really a story of these different images. Prior to me starting the assignment I had been watching “Nature” since its a comfort tv show. I decided to focus on using photos of nature because a lot of parts of our environment have natural and vibrant colors which I thought would work well with the assignment.

When it comes to using filters and textures from the computer to paint, I wasn’t the hugest fan. I feel like painting (at least to me) is very simple and the filters and such overcomplicated trying to make a painting. However it was a very cool thing to learn that I could take the basic knowledge and steps of this process, and use it for future assignments.

I might use these if I am trying to get a quick idea of that filter/theme if it isn’t the main focus of the art. In general though I’ll probably stick to drawing it out, either on the computer or on paper.

For this surreal composition I wasn’t really trying to create a message honestly, I just really though it was idea of a car being lifted up by balloons. It reminds me of one of my friends favorite movies, “Up”. Also I added the volcano in there too just for fun.

For me I relied a lot on converting to smart objects, and masks. It was really fun for me to then use black or white paint brushes to have the multiple images blend together.

I thought that this was a fun creative project for me to do. However I often struggled with focusing for long amounts of time when it came to completing the assignments. Overall I thought it was pretty great.

Animation

In Animation, we spent this unit learning different software to create 3D sculpted figures ready to animate. This was my first year as an animation student and I loved it. We began the year by learning how to make basic structures using 3D shapes. With Maya we began to make scenes and more complex structures after enough practice, such as the Table Scene which was our very first project. After that we did more and more complex structures with Maya: fire hydrants, a greek temple, weaponry, and eventually the beginning structures of our character design. After Maya came Zbrush, which allowed us to create more details and texture to the sculptures. Following Zbrush we used Adobe Substance Painter to paint onto our sculptures color and more texturing. With this we finished our characters and weaponry. I really enjoyed learning all the different software and being a part of the class. Hope you enjoy seeing the process below.