Hello! My name is Kendra Evans. I attend Mountain View High School and I am a web/audio student. I have spent two years at freestyle. Before coming to freestyle, I knew nothing about cameras, coding, or anything about digital arts. I prefere building and creating things with my hands, so having to learn how to paint and draw using a wacom tablet was probably one of the hardest learning curves for me. For this portfolio presentation, I have desided to focus on digital illustrations and I will be showing you my experimental mixed media piece from junior year and my fashion illustrations from this year's innovator project.

For the junior experimental project, we had to create a mixed media piece based off of the abstract phrase that we were given in English. My phrase was, "I am exploring the feeling of irritation through the experience of stargazing". I interpreted this as finding problems with seemingly perfect things. For the project, I decided to depict the story of a fallen angel. Angels are a symbol of purity, and so by making her wings torn and burnt, she has become impure and dirty. She is now trapped underground, unable to fly freely. The greatest learning experience from this project was learning how to interpret ideas different ways, as well as learning new Illustrator and Photoshop techniques. However, I could definitely still of imrove on my skills in Illustrator and Photoshop.

The 21st Century skills that I think I most improved on during this project are visual literacy, technological literacy, and risk taking. For visual literacy, I learned how to create a tangible object from an abstract concept. I improved my technilogical literacy by learning more techniques in Illustrator and Photoshop, and I took a risk by creating the model's dress and altering the image of the model in Photoshop.

For the innovator project, we were allowed to choose whatever we wanted to create. I have a strong intrest in fashion design, so I decided to create a seven piece fashion collection and create illustration of each of the garments. My inspiration for the clothing was springtime, flowers and Disney fairytales. I say Disney fairytales because they are lot more sugarcoated and happier than the original versions, and I wanted my garments to be very happy and dreamy. I origionally created the illustrations on paper, but I then decided that my project needed a digital element, so I recreted them in Illustrator.

Unfortunately, during the production process, I got very sick and was hopitalized and bedridden, and had to cut the number of outfits down to five. Getting sick was very devestating as I essentially got "kicked out" of my own life. There was even a small period of time were I considered dropping out of Freestyle because I didn't think I could complete the innovator project to the standard that I wanted it to be. This project has taught me a lot about perseverence and resilience, as well as how to design clothing for different body types.

The 21st century skills that I used the most for this project are creativity, high productivity, and self-direction. For creativity, I took inspiration from things that empower me and created beautiful outfits from that inspiration. I was very productive when I was working on this project because I created one outit a week, and I improved my self-direction when I had to reassert myself to finish the project.

Before coming to Freestyle Academy, I had never touched Illustrator or Photoshop. I had only ever drawn on paper, so learning skills like how to use the pen tool and draw on a wacom tablet were challenging. I also improved my skills of creating abstract ideas across to my audience and finding new ways to convey concepts that are not cliche. While these are all good things to learn, I think the most important thing that I learned at Freestyle was how to push through a project, even when it gets really difficult tp want to work on a project. My mom once told me, "all artist will hate thier work at some point". This was a really hard thing for me to learn when I got sick and didn't want to turn in my innovator project because it wasn't up to the standard that I wanted it to be. However looking at my project now, I am happy with what I was able to create.

Next year I will be attending college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and I will be studying fashion design. All ove the skills that I learned at freestyle will help me next year as I create clothing and photograph them, as well as help me push the boundries of what art can be, which will make a more well rounded and versatile artist. This is important in the fashion world, as the styles that are "in" are always changing and evolving, and hopefully one day I will be using my new skills to create the trends instead of just follow them.