“How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?”
This was the main idea for our explorations project. In our elective classes, we chose any sort of media to create and explore for our last assignment of the year. I considered a lot of different subjects, from animation to painting, but in the end decided to go with a combination of two of my main interest: drawing and poetry. I thought it would be interesting to combine my love for these things and create an illustrated poem. With an illustration alongside the words, I thought I could add a lot more meaning and symbolism to such a short piece of writing through literal images and the style of art.
it’s alive:
an illustrated poem
One of my main inspirations for this poem is poet Sarah Kay. She is the poet who got me into poetry in the first place, so I find myself writing in a similarly straightforward, storytelling sort of style when it comes my poems. I also found inspiration in the short comic, The Traveller’s Warning by Beckett Jones, on Tumblr. This comic guides the reader through inevitable change in a poetic way that got me interested in other poetic illustrations and short comics, inspiring me to actually create this project.
I decided to go with this specific poem I wrote, titled it’s alive because its a lot shorter than my other poems so I could actually fit in in few enough pages for me to get done on time. I also thought the drawings I would create were a lot more visually interesting than other ideas I had. Once deciding on a poem and breaking that poem down into different pages, I began thumb nailing. Even though this step was messy and a lot of things changed from this to the final product it was helpful when I fleshed out the sketch and line art. After lining the sketch on photoshop, I added flat colors on another layer. Next came shading, the final step that took the longest. I added many overlay layers where I added different lighting effects. Despite spending the most time on this, I’m still completely happy with how some of the shading turned out. Still, I think it looks so much better than the flat colors and definitely makes the piece look finished, transforming it into a piece of mine that I’m actually happy with.
Overall, I had so much fun with this project. Poetry is something I’m very passionate about, and putting one of my own poems into an illustrated form like this was such an interesting process. I’m happy with the increased symbolism I achieved and the illustrations in general. I learned a lot during the process, like how breaking up the poem into pages takes a lot of thought, how to best place the lines on the illustrations and making them stand out, and more about the coloring process through experimentation. I would definitely do this again, and I’m actually hoping to do this with several more of my poems.
Music Recording
This project was hard for my friend, Cade, and I who were collaborating to make use of the recording studio here at Freestyle. We decided that they would teach me how to play the guitar so I could play an instrument alongside their piano. Ultimately, we went with the song “Fight Song” by Eve, a Japanese artist. The two of us happen to listen to this artist and song, and it was the easiest for me to play at my beginner level. While Cade played what would be the lyrics on the piano, I played the background chords on the guitar. We practiced for a long time, the song being fairly fast for the both of us. We struggled with aspects like timing for a bit, but eventually overcame this through plenty of practice beforehand. Overall, I’m very happy with both the experience of the project and the final production. I had so much not just collaborating with my friend but learning from them to produce this piece.
Our Artist Statement
After about a month of preparation, not only learning the song, but one of us learning the guitar for the first time, we made it happen. But not without the help of the great recording technician, guiding us through the recording process. It was both of our first times in a recording studio. We learned how the sound system works and the best way to record with other musicians. In the beginning, we were stressed, but, in the end, we had more fun than expected. It was a fast and challenging song, but we persevered in spite of these ups and downs. During the first few takes, we were nervous and made lots of mistakes. However, after a couple of deep breaths, we forged onwards and overcame our anxiety. Overall, it was an enlightening experience.
Poetry
For this section in English, we created our own poetry after participating in a 3-day workshop with poet Christine Moore. I’ve written plenty of poetry in my free time, but the workshop was a valuable lesson for me and helped me improve my poetry skills. We went over different poetic devices and a variety of exercises to develop poems which helped in the following couple weeks to write and perform a poem of our own.
Even though we wrote a lot of rough drafts during the workshop, I found myself not really connecting to any of them. I ended up pulling from the anxiety I was feeling at the time, from exams to being socially anxious in general. I used different methods like repetition, enjambment, general formatting and grammar to convey a feeling of being out of control.
The performance itself was fun for me; it wasn’t my first time performing poetry, and it’s something I enjoy doing. I did, however, have a hard time figuring out how to say each line because I wanted it to be obvious that the lines in the parenthesis were meant to be separate thoughts from the rest. After some rehearsing, trial and error practices, and peer feedback, I was able to find a way of saying each line to make it obvious enough that were at least slightly different phrases. Thankfully, the poem itself was also shown during the performances, allowing the audience to see the intention behind my words. Through this project, I was able to further explore a topic I’m already interested in and expand my knowledge and skill of it, both writing and performance wise.