Reflections

Introduction

I have finally reached my Senior year of Freestyle, and to kick off this year, we began with a Reflections Project. I was challenged to answer the question “Who am I,” meaning what do I like, and what are my core values. Through this unit, I learned many skills like the Adobe Illustrator repeating transformations in the Mandala Project, experimental writing in English, and very creative visual effects in Adobe After Effects.

Art Curation for Personal Museum

Like every year in Freestyle, we start each year with a field trip to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts (SFMOMA). Last year, I made a one-minute video describing why I like a particular art piece. This year, instead of reflecting upon only one artwork, I reflected upon three that really resonates with me and two that doesn’t and why. Below, I have picked out the pieces that do and don’t represent me; you can click on each of them for more details.

My own work as an artist influenced my choices on which pieces would make it to my museum because it made me choose art that is simple and straightforward (like you can tell what it is), or something that relates to something that I have experienced before. Take seascape art (the first one) for example. Upon seeing it, you can tell it is an ocean. Then the toilet paper roll cardboard honeycomb art for example, it’s a relatable experience, as I like to keep the cardboard part of a toilet paper roll to build things. And for the rainbow tunnel, it reminds me of architecture, or color in buildings. In contrast, the pieces that don’t make the cut are the pieces that don’t match my style or core values, as I’m not a fan of using exotic materials, making something that isn’t identifiable, or making something that doesn’t seem interesting.

My Personal Mandalas

In this project, I learned to create my personal mandala in Adobe Illustrator using features that would repeat what I would draw in a circle. After creating my mandala by drawing objects that resonate with me, I got my design laser engraved on a physical product: a pizza board.

I was always told not to be afraid of who I am, and what I like. Even though people say that a lot, I always have the temptation to gatekeep my passions and core values, due to the stigma on different kinds of majors people are pursuing. This mandala project gave me the perfect opportunity to draw out what I like, such as my favorite foods and objects, and get it laser engraved on a pizza board.

In this mandala, I wanted to illustrate my favorite foods, objects, and Minecraft. I started off by drawing a Minecraft sword with some blocks around it. Then, I drew out my favorite foods, like dumplings, sushi, and seafood. On the outer ring, I drew a train, as I really enjoy watching and riding trains ever since I was little. Most importantly, I want to emphasize what I drew in the center: the brain inside a hand heart. Since I learn at a slower rate and struggled with certain academic topics, I wanted to focus on my passions and activities outside of school that I can enjoy, while also taking care of myself at the same time. I hope that everyone can be proud of who they are beyond their grades in this results focused society.

When creating this piece, I learned how to repeat and reflect transformations around my mandala, so that I would only have to draw each element once. To guide me through this process, I created concentric circles and guiding lines for me to visualize the different rings. I was also glad I was able to find my art style too. I tried out the pressure sensitive brushes and the special brushes mandala artists use, even though I did not use them that much in my mandala. I also experimented with creating my own font, and wrote my name using that font in the center. Creating this mandala made me appreciate my and other’s core values and beliefs, and allowed me to appreciate product design and decoration. This inspires me to experiment with more design patterns to create more mandalas on physical materials for myself and others.

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)

When receiving my laser engraved mandala on a wooden pizza board, I was proud to see my artwork come to life on a physical product. I was also impressed by the precision of the laser machine, as each individual thin line was carefully engraved, even if they were close to each other.

Choosing what material to get my artwork printed on was a hard decision, as there were so many cool options, such as a night stand, a tree trunk, a bamboo board, a pizza board and so much more. I decided to go with a pizza board, because I like to decorate products that are usable rather than something that only goes on display. I hope that in my family meals, my mandala can be used for serving pizza or other foods.

Through this project, I learned so much about Adobe Illustrator’s capability of repeating patterns, and custom brushes when creating my art. I also got the chance to get my feet wet with Adobe After Effects to showcase my project creatively through displaying my process of creating my mandala. My favorite part was seeing the laser machine slowly and precisely engrave each detail onto the final product, as well as taking creative photos of my pizza board through different angles. From receiving my final product, this made me appreciate other’s art as I can tell they used a similar process in drawing apps where they draw a small slice of their mandala and repeat it in a circle. I also look forward to potentially creating a second mandala on another physical product to give it to friends and family.

For the colored mandala, I decided to reuse the black and white mandala I made, and fill my art with colors using the paint bucket tool in Adobe Illustrator before adding a purple radial gradient in the background. When seeing my colored mandala get printed, I felt like my black and white laser mandala came to life, as I got to see the colored versions of my core values, such as my favorite foods, objects, and games.

Picking the colors was a challenge for me, because I wasn’t sure whether to go with cool or warm colors, or what other color scheme I wanted to go with. I started off by coloring each element with any color I felt like makes sense, until I added the purple gradient background. Adding the purple background instantly made my mandala pop out and gave me an idea to go with a cool color scheme of green, blue and purple. Overall, filling each repeating element with color made my core values easier to interpret to others from far away, such as the brain in the inner ring and the train in the outer ring.

My Mandala Video

In addition to just creating the mandala and getting it engraved on a physical product, I learned to make a mandala drawing process video in Adobe After Effects. Through this process, I was able to learn how compositions work and get used to the After Effects interface to show how I was able to create my mandala through revealing each layer one by one.

In this video, I originally started off by screen recording my mandala in Adobe Illustrator, by toggling each drawing in my mandala layer by layer as per the instructions. After stitching the screen recordings together, I added some fading in transitions and keyframes to zoom into my drawing. Then, at the end I put an image of the completed mandala before finally adding some calm background music.

Well, after submitting, I wasn’t really proud of my video. Zooming in would make my Mandala pixelated because the quality of my screen recording wasn’t that great as I did it on a laptop rather than Freestyle’s iMac where the screen resolution would be much larger. Then I remembered something. There was a day when I was scrolling on Instagram Reels when I saw this After Effects video that really appealed to me. In the video, it showed an animation of Apple’s user interface and some behind the scenes of it being created.

The creator that I got inspiration from is bricksdept. I watched one of his YouTube tutorials on how to animate the user interfaces like he does. From his video, I learned that rather than screen recording my slow reveal of all of my layers, I can just straight up import my Illustrator file into After Effects, as Adobe files work very well together across apps that I can just animate each layer separately in After Effects without screen recording. This would allow for more customization and higher rendering quality when I would zoom in.

So I got back to my computer and tried this on my own. In addition to importing my mandala file to After Effects, I wanted to animate a user interface, and for this project, I animated an Instagram post as the introduction to my video. I took a screenshot of my own Instagram post, then edited the text and cut out all the components so that they would be on their own individual layer. Then in After Effects, I could animate each individual component of the Instagram UI and my Mandala, and then use the 3D camera to show each component coming together. I was much more proud of this outcome, despite the fact that my computer had to sound like an airplane engine to make this rendering possible.

Design Class Productions

In design class, we built onto our Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator skills we learned last year to create a summer surreal collage, design a concert poster, and exploring a new style through creating aboriginal art. These projects was a really good exercise for me to practice my elements of design skills, using Photoshop features, and experimenting with different design styles.

Summer Surreal Triptych

Our first design project in senior year was to create a surreal composition of what we did over the summer. Last summer, I joined my friend’s Solar Car team called Garage 803 Racing to compete in the Texas Solar Car competition, which we got third place. Aside from that, I went on a day trip with my family to San Francisco, studied some math, and volunteered at online coding classes. To illustrate my summer in an interesting way, I cut out photos from each aspect of my summer and arranged them in unusual ways for my composition. The first part the triptych was the detailed version with cut out photos, the second part is the minimalistic version where I traced the basic shapes in Adobe Illustrator, and the third part is the AI generated version through feeding it descriptions of the composition.

In my surreal composition, the car in the center focal point is what our solar car team made from scratch. Below the solar car is a computer keyboard, which represents how much coding I have learned and taught over the summer. In the background is San Francisco broken up to pieces, with me holding a camera. The sky is a sheet of liquified math problems going towards the vanishing point as I spent some time helping my friends with their math work. You might be wondering what the acorns are doing here, and well, the CollegeBoard logo is an acorn, so I put some acorns to symbolize that I was studying for the SAT exam.

Some challenges I faced was cutting out the photos precisely using the selection tools, and also creating my composition to make it look more dreamy while also making sure it follows the elements of design by having a balanced visual weight. I had to spend a lot of time figuring out where to position the acorns, the solar car, and use the perspective tool to make the math problems go to the vanishing point. Creating the AI-version of the composition (the third part of the triptych) was also challenging, because I had to be really specific about the appearances and it didn’t always generate what I wanted. But I was super proud of this project, not just because I created a collage, but I also got to teach two of my new Freestyle design classmates how to use Photoshop so that they could create amazing art that they can take with them too.

Aboriginal Art

Following our summer surreal project, we had a quite interesting project called “Aboriginal Art” or in other words, the style of art people used in the ancient times through creating illustrations using dots and only using colors found in nature. This meant that certain colors like bright blue were off limits in order to maintain the organic nature style of art. In addition we had to draw our dots by hand, one by one, in Adobe Photoshop to add onto the style. In addition, our art had to include our favorite animal, our constellation, zodiac sign, and at least three aboriginal symbols of our choice.

My Aboriginal art piece represents my slow and steady personality, as I like to learn at my own pace and put a lot of effort into my work. To illustrate these elements I drew a Turtle for my spirit animal in the center of the piece, as it moves at its own pace but its shell allows it to push through challenges. The three aboriginal symbols I used are people sitting, digging sticks, and flowing water. I chose people sitting around a campfire because I value being involved in my community, digging sticks because I enjoyed digging in my backyard as a kid, and flowing water because water is essential for life. Last but not least, since I was born in September, my astrological sign is a Libra, so I used the Libra constellation and its zodiac sign.

This project taught me how to create art in a way like how people drew in the ancient times, where they could only use colors found in nature and draw imperfect circles to form their shape. To match this style, I created this piece by using the brush tool in Adobe Photoshop, where I drew the dots by hand, one by one, to illustrate the symbols in my art. I went with a monochromatic blue color scheme to give an underwater feeling for my turtle, and made sure the colors were desaturated as it’s difficult to find bright blue colored materials in nature. For the background of my piece, I used the brush and paint bucket tool to create a wave-like pattern. If I were to do this project again, I would experiment with the positioning of the elements instead of having a symmetrical composition. Overall, I had a really fun time creating illustrations that are composed of just dots and it is a style that I would like to keep experimenting with in the future.

Concert Poster Project

To wrap up the Reflections unit in our design class, we designed a concert poster that replicates the style of music for the artist we were making a poster for. We each had our own unique era of music, and then had to do some research about the artist, the era and instruments of the music they play, and what kind of graphic design would be appropriate for them. Since I’m someone who listens to a lot of instrumental music, I picked the classical music genre for this project. Through creating a concert poster for Apocalyptica, a band that formed in the 1990s, I was able to experiment with older style art and linear perspective with musical instruments in this project.

My concert poster is based on the Finnish band Apocalyptica, which started in the 1990s. Apocolyptica is a cello quartet that mainly started off as a Metallica tribute brand before focusing on more of a classical style music. This band fits my enjoyment of music played by string instruments, as the genre of music this band plays is Classical, mainly a neoclassical metal style. In their pieces, they mainly play the Cello and sometimes combine with percussion instruments such as the drums and the cymbals.

The process of creating this poster started off with finding some inspiration online of the 1990s themed graphic design, and the existing Apocalyptica posters their style from visiting their website. I noticed that the most important elements I should include are the four band members along with the cello, along with their desaturated and earthy blue and brown colors to give it a more ancient feel. When creating my illustration in Adobe Illustrator, something I wanted to try out was drawing the cello as if you were to look at it from the bottom to give some perspective. Drawing this was a lot harder than I thought, because I had to visualize in my head what the instrument is supposed to look like in a different perspective, so something that helped me was tracing the general shape of a cello from an online image, and then using the perspective warp tool to angle it. For the band members, I used the image trace tool in Illustrator to turn the photo of the band members into a graphic, and made them stand on the cello that I drew. Finally, for the background, I created a gradient mesh of different shades of desaturated blue so that it is not one solid color, and also added a brick pattern to the background. Upon finishing this project, I learned how to draw complex objects with perspective, and if there was anything I would change, it would be exploring more design techniques to fit the aesthetic of the respective era of music.