Introduction
For our first unit in our senior year, we used explore our identity to answer the question, “Who am I?” through multiple different medias like photography, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. In English we started the unit by writing a personal essay for the Common App or take the alternative option to still write a personal essay but take the alternative route but with a larger word limit. In Digital Media, we designed mandalas on Adobe Photoshop, play around with motion graphics on After Effects and coding on our website.
Mandala
Our first Digital Media project for our senior year was on Adobe Illustrator. We create many templates with many different slices that would reflect from each other to make the process of finishing out mandala much easier. We would then pick a template (I chose the 8 slice template) and drew many shapes and lines using the black pen tool to create cool patterns. Afterwards, we made the color version of our mandala and we have the choice to make a whole new mandala or colored out black and white mandala. Then, with our black and white mandala, it gets laser cut into materials of our choosing.
Black and White Artist Statement
The inspiration for my mandala is my love for pokemon. Originally I didn’t know what I wanted to draw so I doodled Psyduck and then realized that I could make my mandala all about water type pokemon. I struggled a lot picking which water types I wanted to draw. I decided to look up different water types that I thought were cute like Sobbie, Wooper, Wishiwashi, Piplup, Magikarp and Totodile. After that I just drew whatever Pokemon was easier for me to draw without much thought which ended up with me having Psyduck, Sobble, Wooper, Starmie, and Wishiwashi. My friend gave me a great idea of having Starmie in the middle of the mandala since it’s a star and would be a great centerpiece.
Colored Mandala Artist Statement
For my colored mandala, I decided to use the same mandala that I did for my black and white mandala. I decided to use the color palette of Sobble since it has the most overlapping colors of all the other pokemon I drew. Something I had a hard time with was picking the color for the circle background color I did. I went through a lot of colors but a lot of them either just didn’t seem right or it made everything look washed out. I use the pen tool to help color my mandala since I used the brush tool to draw out the Pokemon. I did think about changing the color of the outline but I got lazy and decided not to do it. I’m pretty proud of how it looks out in the end and I really enjoyed this project.
I knew immediately that I wanted some sort of blue as a background for my mandala piece to represent the water types I drew. I had a lot of trouble picking the angles I wanted so I took around 20-40 pictures of different angles and background to see what worked best. I really wanted to show off the engravings of my mandala so I edited the photo to darken the engravings. I also edited the photo to be a bit more blue and fixed the lighting to my liking.
Behind the Scenes
Something that I valued from this project was that it lets me get familiar with Adobe Illustrator again. I hadn’t really touched Adobe Illustrator during the summer break so it took a bit of getting used to for me. I really enjoyed using the brush tool and using different line depth throughout this project. This project taught me to go with the flow about what I’m drawing and to not overthink what I’m doing.
College Personal Essay
In English, we started off by reading College Essay Essential by Ethan Sawyer to help us with the guidelines for our essay. We were given the option of two essays. The main one that most students do is a personal essay for the Common App with the max word limit being 650 words or the alternative is to write a lyrical essay like personal essay with the max of 1000 words. Before writing our essay, we had to brainstorm 20 ‘essence objects’ that represents us for inspiration and find our values. Some of my essence objects were:
- Elephant earrings
- Nadine’s kindness notes
- White string bracelet
- Worn down wallet
- Picture of my younger brother
- Sticky rice
- White 2ds
- Pad See Ew
- etc
We were encouraged to be vulnerable in our essay. I decided to write my personal essay on how I struggled to read and how I overcame it. I had a hard time thinking of unexpected values for my essay since the ones I can think of were quite obvious (self improvement, communication, etc). This essay helped me learned a bit more of myself and allowed me to think deeper about my emotions of the past.
Summer Surreal Collage
This is our first unit back and the first thing Ms. P had us do is a warm up collage about our summer to refresh our Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator skills. We had to add the twist of making a surreal collage of our summer in a art style from any time period of our choosing and there should be at least three pictures in that style.
I had a bit of a hard time with this project because I forgot how Photoshop worked and I was having a creative art block which didn’t help me much either. All I knew was that I wanted this in portrait mode, I needed to include some sort of picture that resembles Thai Dancing since that was the highlight of my summer, and somehow make it resemble art nouveau art style. Eventually I managed to figure out I was doing. I used a lot of filters for mine, the filters I used for this was oil pastel and color pencils.
Public Service Announcement
For this project, we have to make a PSA of a social issue that we are passionate about to raise awareness about it. First we make a mood board of what we want to get the feel for the project and the message we want to convey.
My PSA has a geometrically drawn polar bear standing on an iceberg in the water and the background is a gradient of orange to a light blue. Above the polar bear is the tagline “Love it or Lose it” in a rough bold black font. I am hoping it gets to people who are unaware of the ice caps melting and people who didn’t care about it to care more about this topic. I chose a polar bear because currently, polar bears are not only losing their homes but also their food sources due to global warming. I also decided to draw a polar bear because they are one of the first animals people think of when you think of an arctic animal. I chose to have the polar bear stand on the small iceberg to show that there isn’t much time left and that their homes are slowly disappearing one by one. The color scheme I picked were the contrasting colors of cool tone blues and oranges. The blues are meant to represent the arctic and the oranges are to show how the world is slowly heating up.
I used Illustrator to draw everything on my PSA. The main tool I used was the pen tool to make the geometric shapes for both the iceberg and polar bear. For the iceberg underwater, first I chose a blue from my color palette and drew a curve line of how high I want the water level to be, then lowered the opacity to 50%. I did the same to the surface level water but instead lowered the opacity to around 80-85 percent. To make the background, I did a gradient from a cool orange to a blue and played around with where I wanted the orange and blue to meet. I struggled a lot with picking a font for my PSA since I wanted a rough, loud and bold font but it was so hard to find a font that could print well from a PDF file. I asked a friend to look at different fonts with me since I needed a new pair of eyes and we finally were able to pick one that would fit my PSA well.
Aborigine Art
This project is inspired by the Aboriginals. We are told to make an art piece after a spirit animal (basically any animal we want), our zodiac sign and its constellation. We did this project of Adobe Photoshop with only the brush tool and we can only use dots. The more imperfect the dots are the better.
For my Aboriginal inspired art, I chose for my focal point and spirit animal to be a snake because I always had a strong fondness for them since I was little. Since Aboriginal art used a lot of earth tones, I really leaned into using warmer oranges and yellows because I usually used cooler tones and wanted to try something different. I chose the Aboriginal symbol for star, watering hole and water. Stars to show how easily amazed I can be and how I used to watch the stars with my younger brother when I was little. The watering hole is much more faded to show how I’m slowly trying to rid my fear of being fully submerged in water. And the water to show that I’m a water sign due to my zodiac sign being a Pisces and that I do think I’m an easy going person.
First, I started my process by drawing all the signs and symbols I’ll be using in this project to get some ideas on how I want my artwork to look. Afterwards, I used the hard brush tool on Photoshop to make multiple dots of different colors and sizes to create the snake. Since I spent so much of my time working on the snake, I had a hard time figuring out where to put my symbols. Luckily, I managed to figure something out before the due date and encountered another problem, the border. All I knew what I wanted to do for the border was to make it more geometrical since everything else in my piece was so curved and round. I finally decided to use triangles to contrast the curves of the piece. Overall, the only thing I would change would be planning where I want to put the other symbols beforehand and I like the outcome of this project.