Reflections

Introduction

As a second-year Freestyle student, we started off senior year with the “Reflections” unit. The purpose of this unit was to get us to do exactly what you would imagine – reflect upon ourselves and the world around us. In Digital Media we reflected on the world around us by recording a perspective piece and created an accompanying video. In English we took it a step further to answer “Who Am I?” through a personal statement essay. In Design, we created an aboriginal dot painting, a set of collages, and our names made with photographs of every-day objects. From these projects, I learned how to more deeply appreciate my personal struggles, comedic communication, and the artistic communication of collages.

English: Personal Essay

For the English class part of “Reflections,” we wrote a personal statement essay about ourselves. Other than being simply an exploration of self, this essay was intended to serve as the personal statement essay for college applications, so we read College Essay Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Successful College Admissions Essay by Ethan Sawyer as a guide through the process. Over the next month or so, we did different detailed layers of brainstorming from picking a topic with value exercises, to fleshing out our essay drafts with experience/emotion charts. Overall, the experience was extremely revelatory for me and the things I learned about myself helped me thoroughly answer “Who Am I?” in the context of my essay topic.

        Sitting in seventh-grade biology with my peers, we were starting the most whispered-about unit of the year: sexual reproduction and the human body. As my wacky teacher forced us to go around the class and list the male and female reproductive organs, I started to feel faint and the next thing I knew I couldn’t breathe. I thought, that’s weird. I turned to my tablemates to tell them that my hands were buzzing and just as they called the teacher, I slid off my stool and onto the floor. After passing out and waking up to a flock of confused people hovering over me, spending a long and harrowing night in the ER, and getting driven home from the next morning, I sat in bewildered and disoriented silence. After this happened a few more times, who I was began to disintegrate. Until then, I was a completely normal socially awkward early teen waiting to step up to the threshold of high school and imagined adulthood. I had a group of friends that I loved, parents that loved me, a paved path to valedictorian-ship, and both feet solidly in a happy reality.
        As I entered high school things only got worse. I developed two more similarly debilitating chronic health issues, the three of which interacted much like a line of dominoes. I kept crashing under the weight of them. Every week or so I would get a hive outbreak that sometimes took me to the ER at three in the morning because the incessant, painful itchiness was all-consuming. Every few weeks I would get abdominal pain so bad I would see spots and shake with the effort of walking. And every few months, I would find myself on the floor gasping for air and twitching uncontrollably like a wet bee. It became a miracle when I was able to show up to school. Kids would ask me where I was an what was wrong with me. Funny thing is, I didn’t even know – nobody seemed to. I was a mystery to doctors, my parents, my teachers, my peers, and – worst of all – myself.
        After continuing to be isolated both socially and academically from my supposed peers for so many years, I was at a tipping point. Being all alone, trapped in my mind by my health, pushed me to break my own glass ceiling with the force of my frustration. I learned how to keep in contact with my friends when I was home sick. I built extra lines of communication with my teachers, to help them understand my situation and help me so I could get my schoolwork done on a reasonable timeline. Working extra hard overtime at our school’s tutorial center taught me great perseverance and determination. My grades went up. My school counselor helped me realize that I needed to work my life around these difficulties and with her help specifically in planning course load, I learned how to modulate my abilities to better make up for missing class and social engagements. I learned how to adapt to ever-changing social situations.
        There is no certainty that I will ever stop facing these difficulties, which makes these tools I have developed ever so important. To this day, I wake up and go through the day with unrelenting itchiness and cramps that consume my thoughts with painfully extreme discomfort. The difference is that because of all the struggles I went through, I now have strategies to deal with these challenges at all stages of extremity.

Digital Media: Perspective Piece

For the Digital Media component of “Perspectives,” we wrote a short opinion statement, recorded it, and then created a video for the recording in Adobe After Effects. After effects was a very new software to me and learning it required doing so at an exponential speed in order to complete the video. We learned how to insert photos, edit their placement, and use the opacity, position, and scale controls to create interesting visual effects for the photos.

This screenshot of my Adobe After Effects workspace for the perspective video shows all the elements I needed to manipulate in order to create my video.
This screenshot of my Adobe After Effects workspace for the perspective video shows all the elements I needed to manipulate in order to create my video.

Design: Photography, Aboriginal, Collages,

For the design element of “Reflections,” we created multiple projects using three central mediums: acrylic paint, photography, and magazine paper cutouts. Each of these projects was a reflection on different elements of the world around us.

Photography

In order to reacquaint ourselves with Adobe Photoshop and to get back into the groove of Freestyle and art, we did a short photography project. We went around the Freestyle campus and took photos of inanimate objects that formed shapes or shadows like letters. We then put the letters of our name into Photoshop, edited them lightly, and then put them on a black background with even spacing, to create a border.

My name spelled out with photos of inanimate objects that look like letters.

Aboriginal Dot Painting

After the name photography project, we learned about aboriginal dot art and then began to create some of our own non-traditional aboriginal art. Aboriginal dot art makes images with implied lines. The entire composition is made of dots and so shapes are made by arranging the dots to make what looks like lines and thus shapes. We chose an animal, sketched a few orientations and backgrounds, chose a color scheme, made a bigger formal sketch with colored Sharpies, and then began the painting process. We mixed each color and used both ends of pencils, the end of burnishers, q-tips, and toothpicks to make the circles.

This project was quite new to me and I really enjoyed it because it included another cultural perspective in our standard art curriculum. This project was also our introduction to painting, as we hadn’t done any painting projects in Design as Juniors.

An alternative style Aboriginal dot painting of a sea turtle swimming in the ocean by patches of coral.

Collage Diptych

The collage diptych was our first introduction to collaging in this class and our first diptych art piece. We started with a collage made of pieces of magazine. We created a morgue – an artist’s space for keeping possible parts to add to the composition – of magazine pages with interesting objects and backgrounds. We then cut out these shapes and began to lay them together to find potential combinations. After many attempts, we were able to put together a collage that had an interesting combination of objects with a cohesive color scheme, congruous background, and depth of perception.

A bright red and turquoise color-themed magazine collage focused on a large vintage landline phone with a plate of cherries for a spinning dialer.

After we finished the magazine collage, we painted a direct monochromatic representation of our collage to learn about shape and form. First, we traced the “silhouettes” of each individual object on a piece of vellum on top of our original collage. Then, we pressed that tracing onto a white board using a burnisher on the traced vellum with a sheet of carbon underneath it (like a sheet of pencil lead, the carbon sheet makes dark “pencil” lines when you press it). We chose a color that we wished to use as a central color, and then made tints (adding white), tones (adding grey), and shades (adding black) of that original color to paint each individual space in the collage that was defined by lines.

This part of the diptych taught me a lot about color: how it works, what tints, tones, and shades are, and the general concept of monochrome.

A monochromatic shape painting representation of my collage. My base color was mustard, tints, tones, and shades, make the piece look as if it was made of many colors.

Digital Collage

After completing the magazine and painting collage diptych, we created a collage digitally with images from the internet to practice the shape/form exercise digitally.