Introduction
Freestyle projects challenge students to explore personally relevant, real world topics and issues. With the help of teachers and In this Visual Narrative section of Freestyle, we were challenged to tell stories through our art. In these different projects we learned a variety of modern professional equipment and applications such as Wacom Digital Drawing Pads, lighting equipment, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. This section was a lot of fun and allowed me to show my creativity and learn a ton in the process.
Story
In our English class, we were tasked to write a Flash Fiction Short Story. While writing our stories, there was a lot of emphasis on “Show don’t tell”. This made sure we made our stories clear and easy for the reader to understand. After writing it, we had to record ourselves reciting the story, we used Pro Tools to edit the recording to make it perfect. We added sounds and other audio effects to the recording to make the listener feel like they are in the story. I valued creating the audio version a lot because it adds a lot of the choice and people can choose if they want to listen to or read my work. After recording our story we got to draw an album cover for our story. I drew a suburban street at night because a part of my story takes place there.
Friend
As Jayden walks down Main Street, he stops in front of the pet store. He looks into the window and in the reflection he sees a skinny, tall, dark haired boy. The boy is wearing an ugly pink and blue work uniform. What about me is unapproachable, he thinks. After a long pause, Jayden continues down the street to an old ice screen shop. The bell rings as he opens the door and a cool breeze hits him as he steps inside. He is looking forward to this 5 hour shift because there is a new coworker already standing behind the counter, who will be shadowing Jayden for the day. The boy looks at Jayden and introduces himself as Elijah. Jayden is nervous but introduces himself as well. Jayden starts showing Elijah around the small store. I may have a shot at making a friend, Jayden thinks. At the end of the shift, Elijah invites Jayden to a party happening that night at eight pm. Jayden was thrilled to receive the invite. He rushes home, rips off his uniform and throws on another outfit. He trembles in excitement as he waits for eight pm. Jayden checks out himself in the mirror. The trembles of excitement have now turned into trembles of nervousness. He rushes into his car, heading over to the address that Elijah gave him. When he arrives the lights of the house are off and the street is empty. Sweat drips down his back. Jayden is confused but doesn’t think much of it because he’s never been to a party before. He knocks on the door and a guy answers. He looks to be around Jaydens age,
“Can I help you?” He says
“Uhhh…. My friend Elijah says there is a party here tonight.”
“HA you’re friends with Elijah, yeah right. He’d never befriend a loser like you” Jaydens eyes start to water.
“Oh, well I guess we aren’t really friends because we just met,” he mumbles
“How did someone like you meet someone like Elijah?”
“We, um, work together” Jayden says fiddling with his fingers
“Ohhh, you’re the one Elijah was talking about, yeah he finds you really annoying” he laughs.
“Oh ok” Jaydens voice shakes. His head falls as he starts to walk away.
“Hey loser, just thought I’d tell you there is no party. Elijah set you up.” Yells the boy. Jayden doesn’t respond. He gets in his car and speeds away. His tears blurred his vision making it hard to drive. When he gets home he lays in bed. His pillow soaked from his tears and the sleep eludes him as he replays the events of the day.
The next day Jayden walks into work. One of his other coworkers, Olivia, is behind the counter, preparing the store for opening. Her dark brown hair is tightly tied back. She has thick eyeliner around her eyes. Her uniform is dirty from hours of scooping ice cream.
“Hey Jay,” she pauses. “Is it alright if I call you Jay?” she says smiling.
“Uh, yeah sure, I don’t mind” he gives her a quick smile before he disappears into the back of the store. Jayden has never worked with Olivia before, but the weather is starting to get hot so the store is getting busy. Jayden has heard good things about Olivia. She’s nice, good at customer service, and fun to work with.
“Did you meet the new coworker?” she says while wiping down the tables.
“Yeah I worked with him yesterday” Jayden says remembering what happened last night.
“Oh, is he nice?”
“No, not to me at least.”
“What did he do?” She stopped wiping the tables and looked up at Jayden.
“Oh, well he was nice when we were working together but then embarrassed me after work.” Jayden looked at the cash register to avoid eye contact with Olivia.
“How did he embarrass you?” She asked “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it”
“Yeah, let’s not talk about it.”
“Have you talked to our manager about not working with him again?” She asked.
“No I haven’t, should I?”
“Yes, I don’t want you to work with him again,” She says. It seemed like she actually cared about Jayden. A smile appeared on his face. They both go back to work. Everyone was right about Olivia, she was very fun to work with. She was cracking jokes the whole time and is really good at dealing with picky customers. At the end of the shift, while they are closing up, Olivia asks Jayden for his social media to keep in contact.
“This was such a fun shift.” Jayden says with a smile.
“I agree, we should request to work together.”
Jayden and Olivia proceed to work together and hang out after work. Olivia introduced Jayden to her friend group and her friends were very welcoming to Jayden. He realized that good friends are sometimes hard to make, but in the end are worth it.
Illustrations
For this project we used our new skills of Adobe Illustrator to create a physical product of our art. I decided to create stickers of my bunny. I originally wanted to do something of her because I don’t have much. Unfortunately, while in the process of creating these, she sadly passed away. Now I have these cute little stickers of her to remind me of her. This project helped me expand on my Adobe Illustrator skills and express myself creatively and without restrictions. I am super happy with the results of this project and it was very fun to make. I’m excited to have a drawing of my bunny to carry with me everywhere I go.
Exquisite Corpse
Another project that we did with Illustrator was the exquisite corpse project. We created groups and all made illustrations on our own art boards, at the end we connected them together. We did not know what our other group members were creating. Even though my group and I did not know what each other were creating, I think it all came together very well. My section of this project is the top one, and I decided I wanted to create a horse head. There was no real reason for me to draw a horse, I just thought a horse head could be cool as the top of the Exquisite Corpse.
Music
For the Parody Project, we were tasked with creating a parody of a popular song. Taylor Ewan was my partner for this project. We decided to do a parody of All Too Well (Taylors Version) by Taylor Swift. Taylor and I both love Taylor Swift so we thought this song was perfect. All Too Well is about loving someone so we decided to make it about hating someone. I had a lot of fun rewriting the lyrics with Taylor. After the lyrics were written, Taylor and I recorded us singing our version separately. In Pro Tools we put together was we recorded along with the actual song. This was a very interesting project. I had a lot of fun creating our parody with Taylor.
Our Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Oh, your gross disposition and my side-eye glare
We’re silent in the class, getting bad bad grades
Conversations going down, like puzzles in the wrong place
And I can picture it after all these days
[Chorus]
‘Cause my favorite again, daily mean remarks
I almost ran the red ’cause you were gonna pass by me
Up in my hair, I was there
I remember it all too well
[Verse 2]
Burn book on the counter, steam from your head
You used to be more tolerable, but that changed at ten
And your mother’s telling stories ’bout how you used to like me
I told the entire class, now your future is bleak
Design
For the main Narrative project for design, we were tasked with creating a creature that combines 5 different animals. One has to be an underwater creature, an insect, a mammal, a reptile, and a bird. I decided to mix a manatees body with a snail shell, rabbit ears, a parrot tail, and chameleon legs. The animals we chose connect to the flash fiction we wrote for English. Each animal represents a characteristic of our character. This creature was very hard to come up with and I am very happy with how it came out. For the background, I decided to make it an ice cream shop because in my flash fiction my main character works in an ice cream shop. We used Adobe Illustrator to create this artwork. This was a very helpful project and I gained so many skills from working on it.
Munila
My creature’s name is Munila and they work in an ice cream shop. While working, they are able to have more opportunities to make friends with their coworkers. This is very important because Munila struggles to make friends. Although some of their coworkers aren’t the nicest, they are still able to become pretty good friends with one of their coworkers. Munila is out from behind the counter because they are preparing the store to open. It’s one of the many tasks Munila has to do for work. They enjoy working at this ice cream shop because it pushes them to come out of their shell (get it because they have an actual snail shell apart of them) and talk to strangers.
For this project we used Adobe Illustrator to create our creature and the background. We started this project by connecting animals to our main character. I decided that the five personality traits I wanted to use were quiet, shy, funny, gentle, and charming. The animal I used for quiet was a snail. Snails are very quiet creatures, you never hear them moving. For, shy I used a rabbit. As a rabbit owner, I know that these animals are very shy because they are prey. For funny, I used a parrot. I find it funny when parrots are able to talk, they can say some interesting things. I used a manatee for gentle because they just seem like gentle animals. They look like they’d never hurt a fly. Finally, for charming, I used a chameleon. Chameleons can be very charming with all their bright colors. They are so fun to watch. I think the hardest part of creating the background was the chairs. I had to look up how to draw chairs in one point perspective. Even after watching some tutorials, I still didn’t really understand. Eventually, I figured it out and I think they are the best looking out of the entire background.
Cursive Name
For this project, we used watercolor on printed out designs of our names we made in Adobe Photoshop. We made used our knowledge of color theory to help us make a more cohesive piece. This project was a lot of fun and I love how it turned out.
