Introduction

Although short, the explorations unit was one of the most challenging and intriguing units. Most of our projects are pretty flexible, but this unit gave students the most creative freedom. Our assignment was to explore our passion while improving on a skill set that relates to 21st century skills, which are mostly technology based. I chose to focus on Visual Literacy, Creativity, and Self Direction.

Because of the time crunch, I had to plan a project that would be feasible while still ambitious and challenging. My initial idea was to create a puppet, but I wanted to expand and add more technological aspects. My final project takes inspiration from stop-motion animation, specifically Laika studios. I challenged myself to design a character and bring it to life using clay and felt, and then visually convey a story using photography and props. Although I always had an interest in it, I have never fully committed myself to learning photography until this year, and I wanted to push myself to take some unconventional photos. I have also always wanted to do stop-motion, and although this project isn’t exactly that, it allowed me to work on my character-design skills as well as my 3D art skills.

Process

The first step of my project was planning, and I prioritized designing a character that I was confident and happy in before attempting any sculpting. I decided to create a character based on a garlic bulb (although she looks a bit more like an onion), with a lot of strong colors and a simple silhouette.

From there, I collected my materials and began the sculpting process. And right as I started, BAM, I hit a road block. Initially I had planned to use wire and air dray clay as my main components, but I quickly realized that the air dry clay wouldn’t work well with the wire a as a base. The clay would just slide right off, and it was additionally very soft and difficult to work with. I quickly shifted gears, and instead used a doll body and regular clay that you would fire in the kiln.

Once I finished sculpting, I went on to painting the head and body. I decided against firing the head in the kiln because of the time crunch, and because I still needed to adjust a few things before attaching it to the body. I used a mix of acrylic gouache (because I couldn’t find my regular acrylic white) and acrylic paint. After that I started cutting out my felt pieces. I colored them in with pencil pastels, and super glued them on to the head. I also used felt for the clothes, which I made templates for, cut out, and sewed together.

final production

Here are my final photos! I wanted to give it a fantasy/fairy-like feel, really giving the character life and personality. I’m super happy with how vibrant the characters turned out!

Reflection

I absolutely loved this project. Being able to choose my own medium and art piece, as well as my schedule and direction, we were really given a lot of creative freedom and not having limits allowed me to challenge myself. After doing the project, I have so so so much more respect for stop motion artists (even more than I previously had). I really enjoyed all the different components of creating a character, and I’d love to explore the world of the veggie people more. Maybe someday I’ll come back to the story and characters, although I doubt it’ll be in animation form. I’d like to make a proper stop-motion puppet made of wire and moveable joints, but that’s for another day.

Lyrical Essay

In English, we were tasked with the challenge of creating a lyrical essay – a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir. None of our previous works had been as personal, some scratched the surface, but the lyrical essay challenged us to dig deep. After some thought, I decided to write my lyrical essay about the first crush I had on a girl in sixth grade. I really wanted to emphasize our naivety and that thrilling feeling of a crush, the dumb “like” that swarms your brain. We were given a lot of freedom with this project as well, in fact we were encouraged to take risks with formatting and techniques. This is probably one of my favorite English works from this year, I’m very proud of how it turned out, and I like how freely I could write. We also used an annotated bibliography for the first time, and it was a great chance for me to explain the metaphors I chose.

We were also tasked with using footnotes in this project, something I had never done before. At first I struggled with including research sources and notes, but once I got the hang of it my footnotes came to me very naturally. I decided to include my song mashup from earlier in the year in the essay (linked at the top), and I included some song lyrics in the footnotes, as the progression of the songs follows the theme of the progression of a relationship.

Experimental music

Our last project of the year, experimental music! In Digital Media, we were taught how to use our keyboard, and how to use virtual instruments in Pro Tools to put together our own original song! At first I struggled a lot, I wanted to make my song perfect, but Mr. Flo reminded us that the music was experimental, and to have fun with it! After that I was a lot looser, and I just played what I wanted to.

I was inspired by both the Minecraft ost and Omori ost, as well as loft artists such as Sarah Kang. I also took some inspiration from video game lofi mixes that you can find from those videos on YouTube.

I’m proud of my use of chords, I based my song around C major, and I like that I had some structure in my piece. I haven’t played piano since fifth grade, so I’m happy that I still have some music theory in my noggin.

I valued how freeform Virtual Instruments are, you can mess with the pitch, or work with individual notes and adjust them. It’s a very creative process, and you can either be as loose as you want or as meticulous as you want. I’ll definitely be exploring this more in the future!