Reflections

Introduction

The goal of our reflection unit at Freestyle was to reflect on our experiences and make something to represent us. This unit in English, we wrote our personal essays. We read College Essay Essentials and then worked in groups to peer review each other’s essays. In Design, we reflected on our summers by making collages and then made our Aboriginal art. In Digital media, we worked on personal mandalas.

This unit was about who we are. In all of these class projects, we used essence objects to represent us and our values. In my mandala, one essence object I included is the luna moth. In my English essay, I talked about my sketchbook. In Design, I included a star jar.

In English, we created a list of our core values to help us brainstorm for our essays. In Digital Media, we animated these core values to create a video.

Mandala

The goal for this project was to make a mandala that shows who we are. We used Adobe Illustrator. We set our art boards to repeat a pattern around a circle so that we could make our mandalas more efficiently.

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Mandala

For this project, we used our black and white mandalas and engraved them. The material I chose was the acrylic so that it could be put on an LED stand to be a lamp. I really liked how this project turned out. I think if I had included more detail, it would not have been as clear when lit up. It was really cool to see my drawings turned into something physical so I enjoyed this project a lot.

Personal Essay

In English class, we wrote personal essays to help us prepare for our college applications. We brainstormed our core values and essence objects that we wanted to include in our essays. I think my essay really shows who I am as a person and what I care about.

Design Photo Collage

In design, we wanted to reflect on our summers. We made a collage to represent what we did. We made a photo collage on Adobe Photoshop, then we used Adobe Illustrator to draw the collage. One of the goals was to make our collage look surreal. So, I played around with the scale of the different pieces of the collage. I also edited the photos to make them follow the same color scheme and be a bit more unified.

Design PSA

My PSA is about transgender people. I used the tagline, “You define who you are, not your body.” I drew two people. In front of them, I wanted to show their younger selves to represent their transitions. I filled in the figures with gradients of blue and pink. I also added two additional people in the background to balance the image. My color scheme was blue, pink, and purple. Blue, pink, and white are the colors of the transgender flag and are also heavily associated with either male or female.

We make this, I found silhouettes of people and traced them on Adobe Illustrator. For the adults, I filled them with the color associated with their gender using the live paint tool. After I had their base shapes, I drew on top of them with the pen tool to draw their clothes, hair, and facial features. I found a font I liked on DaFont to write my tagline. Then, I used the pen tool to add more details to the text like highlights and underlined “Not.” One thing I struggled with was making the children stand out. They were blending into their adult self, so I used the pen tool to draw some squiggles around them to draw more attention.

To begin this project, we first made mood boards. I found a few examples of PSA’s that I liked. I decided on a color scheme, font, and some image ideas and put it together into my mood board.

Design Aboriginal Art

For this project, the goal was to create art using dots and lines to tell a story like the Aboriginals.

 I included in this piece the star and the water symbol. Marine biology and astronomy have always interested me so this combines those two interests. The water symbol matches with the whale sharks, and the star symbols show that the whales are in the sky. In the background to add a bit more texture to empty space, I created a cloud like pattern to show more of the scenery.

I created this project on Adobe Photoshop. One problem I faced was that the border was too formal. To fix this, I used the warp tool to distort it into more organic shapes. I think this created a lot more movement. Overall, I am very happy with this piece. I also was originally using too many dots and not enough lines so there was not enough variation on the whale. I really enjoyed making the patterns on the whale sharks and I am very happy with how they turned out.