Showcase

Hello! My name is Jackie Owen, and I’m a Design student at Freestyle Academy. Over the last two years, I’ve explored my interests in photography, design, coding, music production and many other topics. Outside of my media work, I spend my time playing lacrosse, rescuing Pitbulls and practicing my cosmetology skills.

For my Senior Showcase, I am excited to share my Junior Explorations and Senior Zenith projects; these pieces reflect my best work and what I had the most fun creating. I’ve always loved fashion magazines and the interesting covers they produce, so for my Explorations, I wanted to create one of my own. For this, I had to further my skills in photography, sewing, and makeup artistry. I also had to expand my knowledge of various Adobe softwares, such as In Design and Photoshop. For my senior Zenith Project, I wanted to incorporate similar interest from my explorations, so me and a partner decided to create a small magazine/look-book about color theory being used in makeup. High school girls are insanely busy so one of the hardest parts of this project was actually scheduling two models a week, and if they canceled we would have to fit them in another week and both looks took about three plus hours to produce and shoot! I am very proud of the work I produced for this project, I was able to combat any issues that arose and improve my design and makeup skills more than I believed I would.

Next year, I will be attending the University of Colorado Boulder. I am super excited to be attending the College of Media, Communications, and Information, where I will be majoring in Strategic Communication.

You can reach me at jackieowen951@gmail.com

 

Explorations Project

For our final project of junior year, we were given the option to pretty much do whatever we wanted. We were allowed to explore any topic that we were passionate about or interested in learning more about. Since I am very interested in marketing and the fashion world I decided to create a magazine cover that mimicked that of a Vogue magazine cover. I’ve always loved the creative and dramatic looks that are created to represent the magazine and all the steps that are taken to get the front cover image. I wanted to experiment and try to do all of the jobs it takes to come up with the cover, with the help from a friend as a model, I went to work on creating her overall look. I then used InDesign to create the formatting for the cover text. I also created an infographic to go with the theme I was leaning towards with the project, so for this I decided to focus on some negative issues in the fashion world.

My first step was to find someone to model for the cover image, lucky for me I was able to find the perfect girl to be my model. I then had to brainstorm a look that was different, dramatic and would grab your attention. I looked at many different magazine covers and fashion photos for ideas, I decided I wanted to do something with flowers. Since the model had very blue eyes and semi-fair skin I decided peachy, golden tones would really make her features pop. I decided to make a sort of flower crown and work it into her hair. On the day of the shoot my first step was to do her makeup since it was for the cover I decided to go for a bold eye look and pretty natural face makeup. In order to tie it all in with the flowers, I added a lot of blush to make her cheeks very rosy and match the eyes and flowers. I then styled her hair and put the flower crown on. When I took the pictures it was a pretty overcast day with not much lighting so we had to use reflectors and an external flash to try and get good lighting. Since it still wasn’t perfect I had to go in with photoshop and edit the lighting and fix any flaws. After the photo was all ready I created the Cover text to go on top of the Image in InDesign.

 

For my Infographic I decided to relate it to issues in the fashion world and how it affects the media. I researched France’s new laws that state that any media that uses Photoshop to retouch a photo must say it somewhere on the page. They did this because many people in the industry are photoshopping models and celebrities so much and giving the rest of the world these unrealistic expectations of what “beauty” looks like. They are also making models get a doctors note before being able to take jobs to ensure that they are a healthy weight. Any agencies that are caught hiring underweight models can be fined up to $85k and 6 months in prison. Research showed that many agencies were forcing models to lose weight and trying to make them look “perfect” even though they are fine just the way they are. Much like the photoshop having these super skinny models posted everywhere causes a lot of self-consciousness among girls of all ages on how they thought their face and body must look to be “beautiful”. Meanwhile, the US has taken no steps to correct the media on all of the terrible things they are doing.

 

 

Zenith Project

For the second semester of our senior year we dedicated several months to creating our Zenith project. For my Zenith Project I chose to work with my fellow classmate Brianna Sauter. We decided to touch on our knowledge of color theory, portrait photography, and expanded our skills in several Adobe applications. Using this knowledge, We decided to create a book about the different ways to do makeup in order to enhance your features, not hide your beauty. This particular project is a passion for us because we both believe in inclusivity and want to campaign that brands should not just market to one type of person, and instead include all skin tones and types. With the the use of six volunteers, we created looks that would best compliment their eye color and skin tone using the color wheel. Our infographic is meant to be a useful tool in order to teach people how we created these looks in order to help them produce their own. We hope you enjoy this book and hopefully learn something from it!

This Zenith project was a new challenge for both of us because we will both had to work to improve our photography skills since neither of us had much experience, especially when it came to portrait photography. One challenge we had was finding a way to make our book pop, and catch peoples attention. One thing that was difficult was finding a way to do makeup and still show that people don’t need it to be beautiful and that everyone is naturally beautiful in their own way.

Click Photo or link to view the magazine: https://issuu.com/freestyleacademy/docs/zenith_project_by_briannas_jackieo/1?e=2638229/50161680

Here are some behind the scenes shots from our Zenith

 

 

After taking every models photo and editing it, we created an infographic. Each eye color has certain shades that make them stand out, so we used the color wheel to find them. We created “palettes” for every eye color so readers can use it as a guide for how to do their makeup if they want to highlight their eyes.