My name is Nicola Colace, and I’m a high school student currently attending Freestyle Academy as an animation student. I love math and science, but my main focus in life is art. As someone extremely passionate about creativity and the art of illustration, I’ve dedicated myself to studying the arts and have ambitions of becoming a professional concept artist. My dream is to work behind the scenes as part of the creative brains behind complex artistic projects!
My core values in life are hard work, dependability, resilience, empathy, and imagination. I strongly value putting your best effort into whatever you can, because that’s how you improve and progress the most in art, academics, and in life. Constantly striving for excellence is one of the best ways to advance your skills in anything you care about. Being dependable is, to me, a very important part of what makes someone a worthwhile friend, colleague, or even classmate, and is essential for building trust and strong relationships. Resilience is also something I value highly because without it, you can’t recover from your worst lows in life. Whether it’s severe illness, rejection, failure, or loss, resilience is how you can keep living on and find the strength to thrive. Empathy is also significant to me because it’s how humans connect with one another. It embraces emotion and enlightens my perspective on others, making it a key aspect of understanding the world around me. And imagination is what makes me an artist! The way I see the world is heavily impacted by this value; it’s how I channel the human experience into tangible work, find inspiration, and cultivate meaningful visual storytelling.
Outside of school, I love to create art of various forms including digital illustration, traditional illustration, animation, and sculpture. I also love listening to music and seeking out new songs and artists, mainly in the metal and rock genres. My favorite band to listen to is Metallica! I enjoy playing Minecraft from time to time as well. All of these things are activities I love because they really connect me with my creativity, and are extremely open-ended. I can tailor each experience to exactly how I need it in order to get the most enjoyment out of it, and they all often function as major sources of stress-relief and comfort. I love finding and customizing texture packs to make my Minecraft game look as visually appealing as possible, and bringing my mood and energy up with my favorite fast-paced metal songs. And of course, I absolutely love to draw and will sit down to work on an illustration the minute I have any free time.
As a Freestyle student, my expectations of myself are that I will take every opportunity possible to really get the most out of each lesson and project. Though it will cost me a lot of time, energy, and effort, I am determined to make sure that I graduate having taken away as many valuable lessons and knowledge from Freestyle as I can to use to grow throughout my artistic career. I see myself growing very much technically and artistically at Freestyle, especially as I have almost no prior experience with many of the particular topics and resources we work with here. For example, I do not know anything about using the vast majority of Adobe programs, so I will absolutely expand my skills on that front immensely in Digital Media, even if only relatively. I will also be gaining valuable artistic experience in Animation, as many of the projects will teach me brand new animation techniques that I’ve never used before. Animation will also force me to improve my speed at drawing, become more efficient in each step of the animating process, and most significantly, improve my visual storytelling skills.
What I value most about being a Freestyle student is having so many more creative opportunities and resources than are available at my high school. I would never have been able to practice or learn so much about animation without Freestyle, because I simply don’t have enough free time outside of school to dedicate to it. But having the ability to study animation in a class means that there’s built-in time in my day dedicated to improving those skills and building my experience. Digital Media offers so many important and unique experiences as well, teaching me to use professional-grade tools that I never would have otherwise been able to learn to use at such a young age. Instead of being completely in the dark if I ever need to produce high quality recordings, produce a video, or use a professional camera in the future, I have my lessons from Freestyle to look back on so I know what to do. I also truly value the connections I’ve been able to make at Freestyle. Spaces like this are really hard to come by, where you can share classes with just a small, select group of people, all of which you can guarantee share some amount of the creative passion that you do. I’ve found it incredibly challenging to find similarly artistic classmates at high school, and when I do, it’s in an environment that is very difficult to make friends in. In stark contrast, Freestyle is an extremely conducive environment for making friends. There are so few students that you’re almost guaranteed to get to know everyone in your class, which is perfect for anyone like me who struggles astronomically with initiating conversations. And the best part is that you know you all have something in common: liking art! I struggle a ton with making friends, but almost the instant I started at Freestyle, there were already people willing to chat with me and hang out. I’m extremely grateful for the friends I’ve made here, and that alone has made Freestyle an extremely valuable experience for me.