Reflections

The Reflections Project invites students to look inward and discover what means most to them. From mandalas expressing students’ core values and interests, to personal statement essays exploring complex challenges and one’s deepest passions, the Reflections Project teaches students about themselves.

Art Curation for Personal Museum

The Art Curation Project served an an extra layer to our SFMoMA (San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art) field trip this year. We were asked to take photos of three artworks that we would want to keep in our personal museum, and 2 art pieces that we would not. The pieces that caught my eye had uniquely striking colors, had interesting shape or structure, and/or seemed to make a bold statement. I care a lot about innovation in art, and am most drawn towards work that I feel takes a new approach to its topic. Inspiration, originality, and expressiveness are things that I not only look for in others’ art but also strive to implement in my own work, being at the core of what I love about art in the first place.

In my own artwork, I care a lot about visual nuance, experimentation, and color. I generally feel very dissatisfied with the “maturity” of my work, feeling as though my designs or subjects are predictable and overdone. Because of this, I am constantly striving to experiment with my style and push the boundaries of simple ideas, with the hope that the end result will be at least somewhat unique. When analyzing other artists’ work, I generally hold it to a similar standard. I dislike artwork that conveys “overdone” concepts through approaches that I’ve seen many times before. A lot of modern art that aims to be “expressive” reads to me this way (i.e. paintings of lots of splatters and drippy, multicolored strokes slapped across the canvas), because I subconsciously judge it for not pushing past the basic concept and turning it into something new. Purposeful use of color is very important to me as well, and I love using it to strengthen various aspects of my work whether it be symbolism, harmony, balance, etc. I struggle with color theory and criticize a lot of my work for poor use of color, so when an artwork uses color very well, it really matters to me. I very quickly fall in love with art that is vibrant and colorful, in addition to art that uses the absence of color with purpose in order to further a specific vision. This is why I dislike pieces that I interpret to use color poorly, such as 23 feuilles à l’écart. Similarly, this is why I absolutely adore pieces like One-way color tunnel.

My Personal Mandalas

In Digital Media, our first assignment in the Reflections Project was to create a mandala in Adobe Illustrator that expressed our core values. Throughout this Mandala Project, we learned how to create mandala templates in Illustrator that would automatically repeat and reflect each stroke we made in a specific “slice.” We experimented with pressure-sensitive brushes and Wacom tablets, laying down deliberate strokes of varying weights to produce a visually pleasing final image. After creating our mandalas, we created videos showcasing our mandala build process, and photographed the final printed and engraved versions of our digital mandalas.

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I was extremely excited upon first seeing my laser engraved mandala. I love how the thick lines of my mandala really stand out against the wood, as opposed to getting lost among the grain. I especially loved how the center of my mandala turned out; the water dripping illustration looks even better against the wood than it did in Illustrator. This physical counterpart to my digital BW mandala looks exactly as I’d intended. I chose to have my mandala engraved on the wooden pizza board in particular because I wanted a final piece with the greatest visual interest. In my eyes, the pizza board had the most interesting shape, the most polished appearance, and provided the most interesting backdrop for my design. As shown in my final engraved mandala, the pizza board ended up being the perfect contrast to the dark, thick lines of my design to ultimately create a really beautiful piece. I will use the techniques I learned during this project for many future projects in Adobe Illustrator. Working on my BW and colored mandalas taught me how to create a custom repeating and reflecting design in Illustrator, and made me more comfortable experimenting with color and brush sensitivity. I will also use the skills I used working on my build reveal video for future projects in Adobe After Effects, especially precomposition and fading. This project made me realize how challenging it is to create detailed, cohesive, compositionally strong mandalas. I have an increased respect for professional mandala artists and the cultures that mandalas came from.

For this project, I produced a colored mandala in Adobe Illustrator. What sets this artwork apart from my BW Mandala is not only the presence of color, but also a complete change in subject. I decided that instead of coloring my BW Mandala for this assignment, I would instead create a new artwork based on the “Hexcore” (and wild rune) from the show Arcane. In the show, this magical item is characterized by its vibrant colors and unpredictable nature, as it slowly morphs and evolves throughout the story. While my BW Mandala is clean, delicate, and uncolored, this artwork is bursting with color and (controlled) chaos. When I first saw my printed colored mandala, I was excited to see the splashes of color all come together in one final image. The hues were bright and vibrant, and my strokes were crisp. It was really beautiful! In this piece, I wanted to capture the unique colors of the corrupted Hexcore and wild rune in Season 2. Using messy strokes with a pressure sensitive brush, I laid down blocks of color in chaotic gradients from green, to purple, to blue, to pink, and everything in between. The wild rune is covered in holes of varying sizes, similar to the corrupted hexcore, which expose its vibrantly colored interior. I used color to reproduce this visual motif by drawing multicolored circles of various sizes across the piece. I used extremely light colors on top of dark borders and a black background to make the mandala appear as if it was glowing, making the colors really pop. Working with color, particularly through the approach I described, completely transformed my artistic process for this project. Instead of fixating on precision and control like I usually do (like I did with my BW Mandala), I let myself get messy and spontaneous. I thoroughly enjoyed letting go of my perfectionism and embracing the chaos of color. This allowed me to work much faster, and I was easily able to finish the piece on time. What stands out the best in my mind about this piece is how your perception of the artwork shifts as you zoom in and zoom out. Up close, the mandala looks extremely messy and random, and it’s difficult to make out any distinct shapes. However, as you zoom out and observe the bigger picture, it all melds together and becomes a cohesive image. It’s order made out of chaos, just like the Hexcore. One of the mandala’s other stand-out elements is the illustration in the center: the Hexcore from the beginning of the series in Season 1. Unlike what it would eventually morph into, the Hexcore from the beginning of Season 1 is very clean and refined. It is made up of crisp geometric shapes and has a very limited color palette of mostly blue. Being the center of my mandala, this image represents the origin of the corrupted Hexcore that my mandala is based on, and the explosively colorful wild rune that would eventually spawn from its repeated use.

After completing our mandalas, we were tasked with producing a video showcasing the process of creating one of our mandalas through a timelapse. To create a timelapse of my process, I first hid all of the layers composing my BW mandala in Illustrator. Then, I screen recorded my artboard while manually revealing each layer. I split this process between multiple screen recordings to edit together later. After aquiring the timelapse footage, the assignment moved into Adobe After Effects. Using After Effects, I added music to my video, adjusted the duration of my timelapse footage, added an animated title sequence, faded out the end of the video, and zoomed in and out of the video using keyframes. You can view the final product below!

I’m very happy to have learned how to create mandala templates in Adobe Illustrator. I now know how to create custom repeating and reflecting designs in Illustrator for any purpose I may need, and have the flexibility to create designs with various numbers of slices. When making my BW mandala, I enjoyed becoming more comfortable with the Wacom tablet and pressure sensitive brushes in Illustrator. It was very fun to come up with my design and to produce my center illustration. My colored mandala was also very fun to create, especially because I could go wild with colored strokes. I was excited to produce a piece based off of one of my favorite shows, Arcane, and I’m very happy with how the final product turned out. Producing my mandala build reveal video taught me a lot about working with Adobe After Effects.I learned how to precompose sequences of clips to edit them as a single clip, and I strengthened my skills in timing video fades with music. I loved getting to see the process of my BW mandala slowly coming together in a timelapse. Finally, my laser engraved mandala was a very satisfying final product for my mandala project. It was a lovely physical counterpart to my digital BW mandala, and engraved beautifully on the wooden pizza board. Across this entire project, what I am most proud of is the center of my BW mandala, my use of color and painterly brush strokes in my colored mandala, and the beautiful transfer of my BW mandala design to its engraving on wood.