May 2022 – June 2022
“How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”
Introduction
For the Explorations Project, we were challenged to explore our passions and improve on skills that address 21st Century Skills
Starting this project was very difficult for me, this year I learned so many new skills that I wanted to improve on, and it was challenging to narrow it down. I started thinking about projects in my Design class I had the most fun with, which helped me decide that I wanted to work with Adobe Illustrator, which is probably my favorite Adobe Application.
What made me want to work on linear perspective more was our Narrative creature project, using linear perspective to create a scene from the story we wrote. Before we started this project, we were challenged to create our room using linear perspective, something I really enjoyed but did not like my final product due to time constraints. I wasn’t happy with how empty the finished product of my room felt to me, so I started redoing it again on my own time, which as you might be able to tell has improved a lot, the mattress and the bookshelves are a lot more proportional.
Explorations Production
Knowing I wanted to continue linear perspective, I started brainstorming things I could create and settled on my house. I have lived in my house all my life and it is very important to me, and I was very excited to start this project. I started to brainstorm what parts of my house I wanted to create. In March, I drew my kitchen on a sticky note, which inspired me to create it again digitally.
After picking that piece, I decided to do a birds-eye view of the upstairs and downstairs, which is a perspective I have not drawn before.
There was a popular trend a few months ago, where you would make videos and take photos using a fisheye lens, something that would make everything appear as if it was in a bubble. I decided to try and learn how to draw fisheye, also known as 5-point perspective. I also wanted to try to draw my room from a different wall than I usually do.
I went through a lot of rough sketches, on paper and digitally, which helped me accomplish what I did. I had a lot of challenges getting the proportions right for the birds-eye pieces because my house was not the same size as a regular piece of paper, and I realized too late that my drawings did not have to be 8.5 by 11.
I am proud of how I was able to pull everything off and would like to thank my mom for the quick replies when I would frantically message her during class, asking her questions about the house and wanting her to send me pictures.
Challenges
One problem I came across though is when I first started drawing the kitchen, I made the cabinets on the walls, rather than outside or on top of the walls. In the image, the red line is the back wall, so in the photo on the right, I took the cabinets and expanded them to fit on the red line so they would pop out of the wall like it’s supposed to. I luckily was able to catch this really early on and did not affect me that much. Another thing that slowed me down was creating my kitchen tiles, which are checkerboards with diamonds. To make sure the diamonds looked proportional, I had to individually create each one, which took a while to pull off but it was worth it in the end.
Bird’s eye view may have been the easiest, but it was the most time-consuming. I did not realize how I had no idea what colors anything was in my house until I had to start this project. Making sure the upstairs and downstairs were proportionate to each other was difficult, but once I had the upstairs done it was easy to copy and paste the boxes over to make sure everything was the same size. Other than that, I had no problems making the bird’s eye view, although I wish I made my canvas a different size.
Fisheye was definitely the most challenging. I had to watch many videos on how the vanishing points worked and had to take a lot of time creating my guidelines because almost every single shape I created had to have a curved side. This was very time-consuming and I had a lot of trouble creating my bed, and although I wish I created more aspects of my room to make it not seem as empty, I am really proud of what I made.
Finished Products
Kitchen
Creating my kitchen in Illustrator was one of my favorite pieces to work on, being able to digitally create everything was so much fun but also quite a challenge. I would like to thank Lindsay McKinley for helping me with my kitchen. During our Documentary unit, she made a book about her mom’s passion for bread-making during the pandemic. Lindsay created some graphic design elements that I knew would fit right in the kitchen and save me some time. Using her graphic designs helped me save time but I also really appreciate how much help and tips she has provided for me in this unit. In the end, I think I still like the homemade drawing of my kitchen on paper, but I really like the clean-cut lines I would not have been able to make on paper!
Bird’s eye view
Fisheye/5-point perspective
Experimental Music
Making experimental music was really difficult for me, I am not very confident in my ProTools knowledge and thinking of original beats was challenging. I was lucky enough to pair up with Lindsay McKinley, and we produced this song together. We had a lot of laughs trying to figure out what sounded good and bad, and being surprised at the decent beats we were able to come up with.
In the beginning, we had no initial ideas for creating our song. We started by playing around on the keyboard and adding ascending piano notes. At Freestyle, we have a lot of opportunities to peer review and work together, but we rarely get to work on the same projects. This project was a fun and unique collaboration experience, and we both feel that we’ve grown as music creators. Despite initial difficulties with Pro Tools, we persevered and tried our best. In our opinion, our original song represents our journey at Freestyle and our experimental mentality throughout the year. The song title, “GNOS” is the word “song” spelled backward. If we were to do this again, we likely would plan out our process more fully before beginning and spend more time getting comfortable with the program.
The Explorations unit is probably my favorite unit we have been in so far. Although I may have given myself too much to do, I think I was able to handle it well and still pull off some very nice pieces. This first year at Freestyle has been so much fun, and I can’t wait to see what next year will bring!