Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Anxiety: A Junior Experimental Project by Collin Frietzsche (2013)

The feeling of anxiety can focus our lives on the negative aspects of experiences, but trying new things is essential to achieving success and happiness. I tried to portray this feeling in my multimedia Experimental artwork. The foreground of the image is made up of cracked glass, which represents the hardships and difficulties that I feel when I step outside my comfort zone. Underneath lies a self portrait a fellow Freestyle-er took using a technique involving light photography with long exposures. To break up the image into various ''zones,'' I used Adobe Photoshop photo filters. I began in the top left with a reddish tint and finished with green in the bottom right. As one’s eye travels across the page, they’ll notice the red first, which represents the desire to try something new, and then finish at the green, a metaphor for a new being: a matured person with a developed attitude towards new situations from past experience.

The first step in creating this piece was figuring out how to make broken glass. I first tried making sugar (candy) glass, but that didn’t produce the intended effect. In the end I used real glass which I scanned into photoshop with a red piece of paper behind it to illuminate the glass. I used a hammer to crack a hole in the center leaving the perception that all the broken glass was leading toward my head. For the actual picture, my friends and I went out at night using a thirteen second exposure to outline each other’s bodies with flashlights. This effect gave off a ''halo'' aura that I thought would be perfect for this project. After importing the picture to photoshop, I decided to use the different color filters to portray the different emotions behind this idea of anxiety, hardship, and eventually happiness. I created a grid pattern playing off of the idea of the rule of thirds. This method framed the subject. After editing the picture, I added the broken glass over the image and then went through and used the paintbrush tool to create the red tint on the broken glass. Using these different mediums of art allowed me to design a piece that focused on anxiety while experimenting with cool ways to capture emotion.
Visitors 1255