The Explorations unit was our final unit at Freestyle, which combined exploring thought and our unconscious mind, creating automatic writing and drawings, and delving into a new concept for Web Audio. Even though I just joined Freestyle as a first year senior, I have had an amazing year and have learned so much. I love the learning environment and as a result I have grown so much as an artist, writer, animator, and person. There aren't even words I can write to express how much this experience means to me.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell was our English reading for this unit. I loved reading this book because it was such an interesting topic, about what goes into unconscious desicions and how our blink brain really works. For this unit we read and discussed the book, had meditation to relax our mind, and automatic art and writing. We also read an article on the importance of play to your mental health and creativity, and were given structured play time outside to help our creativity flourish. My art piece, which were based off of the quick write prompts, is displayed below.
To create this piece, I used two of the art pieces I created during the Blink unit, one made with acrylic paint and the other with colored pencils. I layered them on top of each other along with another photo I took of a chandelier, which adds the star like effect to the spiderweb. I drew in the triangle in Photoshop and added text from my blink write on top of it. This unit was all about exploring new areas of thought in our writing and in our art. I used a new font in this piece, along with incorporating a new photoshop technique to make some of the lines look like they are dripping.
Another part of this unit was the Humor project in English and Design. We studied different comedy techniques and watched many humor samples in class before writing and performing our own humor project and creating a design piece to go along with it. I wrote a commencement speech, and drew a caricature based of my writing for my design piece. My speech and artwork are displayaed below.
The type of humor I used in this piece is caricature. This related to my humor project in English, which was a commencement speech. I talked in my speech about how the enormity of high school can be overwhelming, but through it all, we’ve kept going. This sketch depicts Marshmallow from Frozen as a hulking monster lurking right over a student who is passed out, exhausted, among piles of books. All the words on Marshmellow are classes and obligations we’ve had throughout high school. I drew this image and scanned it into my computer, then placed it on a grey background and added text in Photoshop.
For WebAudio, we had to explore something new that we had never done before to creaete a mini project to go along with our website. I chose to animate a lric video to the acoustic version of the song latch by Sam Smith using After Effects. I used After Effects to create the narrative animation for the last video and was hindered by my limited understanding of the program, so I thought it would be cool to use it more now that I have more experience under my belt. You can watch the lyric video below.