Reflections Project Introduction
For the Reflections unit at freestyle, we were tasked to look back and reflect on who we are as people and creators. This spanned from digital media where we created mandalas that represented us in some way, to english class where we wrote about why we do a creative endeavor. Overall this project was very self introspective and gave me a difficult time with something I normally don’t do. I enjoyed all the projects in this unit greatly though and think that I might even understand myself slightly better after it all. I understand now that I can make impressive things if I just put my mind to it and that sometimes the first idea you come up with might be one of your best ones.
My Personal Mandalas
For the mandala project, the idea of reflection would be very direct as they would be made to represent or show an aspect of us in some way. For those that don’t know, a mandala is a type of circular repeating artwork orginating in ancient India. For our version though, the repeating would be done automatically through illustrator, allowing us to only draw on a slice and have it repeated all throughout the circle. I had a very difficult time trying to think of ways to capture myself just through a mandala so for both of them I just decided to focus on something I find important or enjoy as a way to show or represent myself.
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For this piece, we were tasked to create a mandala that represented who we were as people. I found this task to be very difficult because I couldn’t think of how to capture myself or my values simply by using the repeating drawings of a mandala. And so, in order to align this project in some way I decided to focus on one aspect of myself that I thought would translate well into mandala form. And that is that I love nature and animals.
Going with this theme I started by creating a branched design that formed a circle separating the rest of the mandala from the center. This is because initially I planned to add a non repeating design in the center but later changed my mind. After drawing the branches I made a Venus Flytrap and flower beneath it. It was at this point that I waned to add some animals and so added the bird and fish. Finally I added the snails above and the final design on the edges which I intended to initially look like eyes but actually be a little sapling.
Overall, I think I successfully captured one aspect of myself and accurately represented it in mandala form. I am very happy with the final result as well as the knowledge of reflecting and symmetrical patterns I gained from this project.
For the colored mandala I decided to make a completely different design but follow a similar philosophy to my black and white mandala. So I began to think of what interest I would choose to represent me and I eventually decided on video games, specifically the game league of legends due to me being completely absorbed in it as of late.
After I decided on my focus for the piece, I decided I wanted to focus on the weapons of my favorite champions from the game. Initially I wanted the entire mandala to just be weapons but at some point I realized a lot of my favorite characters don’t have traditional weapons that I would be able to put on the mandala. Because of this I decided to focus on three weapons on an 8 slice mandala. Those three were Mordekaiser’s Mace, Pantheon’s spear, and Yasuo’s sword. After I made those three weapons I made the background be all the runes in the game on a 16 slice mandala to express some of the creativity in builds offered to players by the game. However this process took very long and didn’t turn out that good in my opinion so in the future I think I would just focus on a few of my favorite runes in order to focus it more on me and save time.
My mandala build video used after effects to show each stroke used in the process of making my black and white mandala
The mandala project was a somewhat long project but a great way to start the year. It gave us the opportunity to get back into working with illustrator, aftereffects, photoshop, and even wordpress. It also gave us the chance to express ourselves through a new type of art. I don’t really have any complaints or issues with this project because of it’s simplicity and how fun it was to do.
Why I make games Essay
This was the main portion of the english part of the reflections unit and it was a project in which we were to explain why we decided or just do a certain creative endeavor. The baseline was a why I write essay although I decided to do one on why I make video games. For this project, we used George Orwell’s why I write as an example and guide for what our final essay should look like and while I took some inspiration from his essay I strayed off from it quite a lot.
