Work. Create. And Work

Introduction

The reflection unit takes place around college app season for all the seniors. And doing college apps requires a lot of self reflection in order to write essays about ourselves to people we don’t know. So the reflections unit in Freestyle gives us the opportunity to practice reflecting on ourself through various projects throughout the electives. In english we get to reflect by working on personal essays with advanced self analysis techniques. In digital media we created a mandala that represents ourselves in order to reflect. And in film, we made video essay films to reflect special parts of ourselves in creative ways.

One thing that I learned about myself through this project is that I really haven’t done a lot of self reflection. I had always thought that I was self aware and knew a lot about who I am. But through this, I discovered so many things about my character and past that determine who I am that I could reflect in the art that I created in this unit.

My Personal Mandalas

The mandala project uses the transform tools in illustrator to create this pattern across a circle. This pattern of reflections and rotational copying creates this template where we can create really cool art from just painting one slice, and the entire pie gets decorated. So we used this technique to create two different artworks. One that is black and white which can use engraving to make physical art. And the other uses color so that the colors can be dye sublimated into a plate.

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When I first saw my engraved mandala I was surprised. I had seen these pizza boards all over the room for a year, and I had been working with my mandala on the computer for a couple days. So seeing that design on the pizza cutters that I’d see around the room was really awesome. When the art was made on the computer, the markings were all done in black. But when it was engraved into the pizza cutter to create an indent, I think it actually looked better because it looked more professional. Something you might buy at the store. Which makes me appriciate engraved art more.

I chose the pizza cutter because my friend is a cook. And I wanted to use this project as a gift to him in. I also like knowing that my art can be useful in real life, like for cooking. Another reason I went with the pizza board was because of the theme of my mandala. My mandala is all about creating a story about my past and myself through all the different occupations I wanted through the years. Almost like we’re looking at different slices of me. So using a pizza board which can be used to create slices fits in with that theme. Working with black and white definetely posed a challenge. Because certain objects like a cowboy lasso or cowboy hat are very hard to depict without the iconic brown of it. One way of tackling this was by looking at reference photos which allowed me to copy the exact curves of the different objects I’m drawing. Other times, I just embraced the absract look of it knowing that not everyone is going to know exactly what each object on the mandala is. And I think that’s okay because this is a reflections project. Where we are supposed to reflect on ourselves in a way that is personal. So if theres an element of the mandala that has meaning to us but not as much to onlookers, then that fits the goal of this unit.

I produced a completely different art piece for my mandala which is inspired by the little mermaid. Where I added all the different colors of the movie and key characters. Seeing it come together was really fun because as I started adding more elements of characters like Flounder and Ursula, it began to feel more and more like the theme of the animation.

I wanted to make this have the same style as the movie. So I chose this simplistic stroke style that emulates that of the disney animation. In the middle of creating this, I needed help making the blue of it look more like an ocean. So I had the help of my friends to show me how to create an ocean like gradient which ended up looking way better. And I learned that the gradients are a great way of creating interest in simple art like this. So I’ll definetely be using gradients more in the future. The seashell in the middle was made with transformations. I was initially going to rotate manually, but the transformation tool enabled me to do this evenely so that the seashell is symetrical.

Now that we had these mandala’s created, we wanted to create something that allowed us to not only show off the pieces but show off the process which we created them. So we loaded up a new software called After Effects, this adobe software for special effects that can also be used for graphic editing. We used this to edit a video that shows each of the strokes of our mandala being added one at a time so you can see the process of it being created.

MANDALA VIDEO

Being a film student among visual artists in digital media is not always the best feeling. I’ve become used to the fact that my art just won’t be as good as the screens to my left and right. So the effort I put into this was about the same as any other project. Try my best to make it look good, and if I do a decent job I can move on. But then when I saw the entire picture being put together on the black and white mandala as I got closer to the center made me really proud. Especially when I got to see the whole art engraved. So when people kept asking me why I’m doing an entirely new colored mandala instead of coloring my current one, this is why. This gave me this new motivation in a digital media project where I wanted to really focus on making it look really good. And in the end I’m really happy with how it turned out. And I want to see what I can do if I keep putting this attention into future projects.

Art Curation for Personal Museum

The art curation project returned us to the heart of the beginning of Freestyle, the SFMOMA. Returning with a new perspective on art and a new goal of entering college, we were tasked to find art pieces that we like and dislike. Using these observations, we reflected on our personal tastes

Core Values

In the core values video, we reflected on what values we value most in life and made a video about it using effects in adobe after effects. In this project we got to reflect on the things we care about. And use some art to express it creatively.

All the fonts in my document have a couple similarities. They are all very legible, where the fonts aren’t super thin and the color is bright enough to stand out. Because that clarity in the piece is important to me. But I decided to have different colors for each word. For example, epicness, which is supposed to represent my appriciation for beauty and awe in art and entertainment, is colored orange. Orange is like fire and victory which I wanted to feel from that word. Also the word consistency is in white which shows some formality which is something I appriciate too.

The fonts are also something I considered when adding these values. Entertainment is in big bold wacky letters because that enbodies the entertainment I enjoy. And the word feelings is in a serif font that is more subtle, to show my appriciation for those more quiet emotions that are less bold. And then for the transitions, I decided to make the more quiet values have a more subtle enterence. Like consistency has a simple typing transition. While community has a super jittery animation like the jitteryness of creating a community in a bustling atmosphere.

Reflections Film

In film, we used this unit to create a film that reflects on ourselves as people. The way we did this was by telling a story through an audio recording then adding visual cues to enhance that image. I started by finding something that is unique about me and then adapting that into a story that could be told visually. I used my interest in asking questions because that sounded like something that could be interestingly depicted visually. So I used special lighting and transitions in order to show that theres someone inside my head that is working on creating questions, like an internal space station processing unit. And then by complimenting that with my story about asking questions I was able to reflect on who I am as a person through this film.

What I valued in this production is it forced my to think critically about who I am. And by interpreting that into a visual medium, I could get a better reflection of who I am. I hope that going forward in my film career, I can learn more and more about myself through the art I create.