Our Reflections unit was a ton of fun. The goal of the unit was to learn more about ourselves; we took a deep dive into understanding who we are through projects like our personal essay in English, the mandala in Digital Media, and our video essay in Film.
Through the process, I learned a lot about myself (especially through my video essay and personal essay). Because both projects were pretty substantial in size, I had a lot of time to reflect on my values and core motivations.
Digital Media
Mandala
For our mandala project, we were tasked with creating a piece of art that both reflected who we were and look cool at the same time. We used illustrator and created a mirroring template so that each slice of mandala was exactly the same as the one next to it, creating a symmetrical effect. Because I love the outdoors, I themed mine on nature. I wanted to show the relationship between all of the aspects of earth. I included a flower in the center to represent life which I then surrounded with a sun. I then added diamonds and trees to represent natural resources with little squiggly lines through the rest of the mandala to represent the air.
Photoshop ART
I had a lot of fun with the photoshop projects this semester. I decided to not take any of my themes too seriously, and that decision resulted in some of my favorite art that I’ve made in class.
This project was much harder than I first anticipated. I spent around a week making this pastel painting, and the reason it took so long was because the image I chose to paint had so many lighting variations. This meant that I was constantly switching to different hues of white and black which lengthened the process by a lot. I had a great time making this, and I plan on using the (relatively simple) skills I learned to paint more images in photoshop in the future.
I am not the best painter so I decided to go for something simple that was within my skill level. As can probably be inferred from the title, I decided to try and depict life in darkness. I expressed this idea very literally, painting a tree being consumed by darkness. I had a good time messing around with the different brushes and textures, and I really enjoyed using different shades of the same color to make the tree trunks. With this experience under my belt I am ready to take on a more complicated digital watercolor painting.
After actually painting a watercolor image manually, this process was much easier. It was cool to be able to leverage the effects in photoshop to create an image that looked as if it had been painted normally. My favorite part of this project was picking out the images to apply the effects to. I chose three that felt energetic which is why the title for this project is “what it is “Adventure”.
My world building project is about a journey, so I decided to make this trippy image. I thought it would be cool to show a plane in space, along with shadows of unseen figures standing on the wing. Because this image is set in space, I of course also had to include an alien.
Film
Per usual, film this semester was a lot of fun.