August 2022 – December 2022
“Who am I?”
Introduction
This semester was all about reflecting on who we are and what represents us. In English class, we were encouraged to find our core values and “essence objects,” things that are very meaningful to us. Our core values and essence objects would be essential to our projects for the rest of the semester, from creating a mandala to making a public service announcement, we had the chance to do a lot of self-reflection this semester. I am very happy with what I made this semester and very grateful for having the opportunity to be more meaningful this semester.
Mandala
Making a mandala was the first thing we started to work on in Digital Media this semester. After learning how to create templates, we got to experiment with different brushes to help us make our mandala our own. My mandala is inspired by the elements, of earth, fire, water, and air.
No Color vs Color
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Creating this mandala was definitely not the easiest, and I found myself constantly getting stuck with what to do next. Coming up with things I was happy with was a challenge, but doodling random shapes and lines on my mandala helped me find something I was pleased with.
I am very happy with the final products of my mandala. We got to create a video of us making it, as well as it getting it engraved on a piece of our choice. I really like how the engraved piece turned out, and I think the border being non-circular is a nice touch.
Laser Engraved Mandala Artist Statement
This is the final piece of our Mandala project and I am so happy with how it turned out. In the beginning, I wished I spent more time on it and given it more details, but I love how the engravings turned out. I am glad I picked this piece because I was able to customize the border around the mandala so it wasn’t just cut out in a circle. I can’t wait to put it in my room when I get it back.
Photoshop Art
Pastel Painting
For this assignment, I decided to paint the Shoreline amphitheater, a picture I took when I was at a concert recently. I had a lot of fun doing this assignment because in Design we are also drawing using Photoshop, so it felt like a fun combination of two of my classes.
Watercolor Painting
For this project, I chose to recreate a picture of a sunset that I took at camp. I had a lot of fun completing this project because in Design we also had a project that had us work with brushes in Adobe Photoshop. My favorite part of this project was probably getting to experiment with different brushes, and renaming the ones I enjoyed so I could refer back to them in future projects.
Water Color Effects
Using Photoshop, we took original photography and turned it into watercolor art.
Surreal Art
This project combined our English World Building unit with our new photo compositing skills in Digital Media. When coming up with our world in English, I focused more on the world itself while my partner worked more on the characters. Our world consists of many, spread-out urban cities. I decided to take a small spin on this concept and make the cities floating in space, which although is not accurate to our story, sometimes our characters may feel like they are floating in space. In the end, I had a lot of fun making each island, the buildings came from the same photo and I got to separate them.
Design Projects
Pubic Service Announcement
The PSA project was introduced to us after we talked about our core values in English class. We were instructed to make a public service announcement based on our core values. My core values are ______. I decided to make my PSA about deforestation and forest fires, to hopefully encourage others to protect what’s left.
Before designing our project, we were told to make a mood board with the color palette we wanted, along with some announcements that touched on similar issues.
After making our mood board, I started to design my final product. My idea was to make a path through a sparse forest, that has tree stumps and fallen trees, and the catchphrase on the path. I was struggling to create good trees for this project and went through many different possible designs. One thing I really enjoyed about this project is that I used my own handwriting to create the font. First I found a font I liked and then traced over it to make it more my own. With the outlines, I used the pen tool in Illustrator to make them cleaner.
Aboriginal Art
The Aboriginal project was about creating a piece based on a traditional Australian Indigenous piece, consisting of earthy colors. We were told to include our “spirit animal,” zodiac sign, constellation, and Aboriginal symbols. I decided that my spirit animal was a frog, and made it the focal point of my piece. One symbol that I incorporated into my piece was stars, which consist of one big circle surrounded by eight tinier circles. Although it may be hard to see, there is a big star on the back (or stomach depending on how you see it) of the frog, and smaller ones around the rest of the frog.
I had a lot of fun working on this piece, however in my drawing class I was working on a stippling project, so having two classes that consisted of strictly dots made my hand hurt a lot. Overall, I am really happy with how this piece turned out. To learn more about Aboriginal culture, check out this link: https://www.aboriginal-art-australia.com/aboriginal-art-library/aboriginal-dreamtime/
The projects we had this semester were so fun and I feel like I learned so much. Coming back to school a week late was scary, but the projects here at Freestyle were perfect to ease into. I can’t wait to take what I learned this semester and apply it to next semester’s work, as well as any future personal projects.