In February, we had our Mid-year exhibition, where we displayed a variety of projects from all 3 of our classes. 

 

Digital Media

In my Digital Media class, we explored a variety of mediums including music production with the use of programs like Reason and Pro Tools and digital design by using Adobe Illustrator to draw our own mandalas.

Mandala Project

For our Mandala Project, we used reflective techniques on Adobe Illustrator to create our own unique mandala drawings. We finished with a copy of our drawings printed on either wood or vinyl. This project taught us to use lines and shapes to create a symmetric masterpiece.

Watch me create my Mandala! 

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Freedom Project 

For my freedom project, I chose to do a tutorial on how to give a watercolor effect to the background of a photo. I chose a photo that I took and I filmed myself editing it in Adobe Photoshop.  

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Design

In my Design class, we created many art pieces with a variety of different mediums and using different applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign. 

Alphabet Name Photography 

Using a variety of lenses and DLSR Cameras, we were challenged to shoot field photography images of alphabet-stylized letters to spell out our names, and we were instructed to not “create” the letters but instead find them by looking around the freestyle campus. We then edited the photos and put them together in order to spell out our name. 

 

Shape & Form Magazine Collage

One of the projects in my design class was to create a collage entirely from magazine cutouts. We were asked to select multiple images inside of magazines and cut them out in order to place them on a background and form a collage. In order to create this unique collage, I searched through multiple magazines to find images that I liked, and I cut them all out using an X-ACTO knife. The whole idea of this project was to put together things that aren’t practical- such as sunflowers as hair, and a bird inside of a shoe. I decided to make the background dark blue and find images with bright colors in order to give my collage a nice contrast. 

Monochromatic Shape Painting

 

Photoshop Collage

Using Adobe Photoshop and many images found online, I created a Magazine Collage that embodies my personality. I am a total California girl, and I love bright colors, sunflowers, and the ocean. In my college, I have a vintage malibu car on an in & out burger sign, a bear painting a rainbow, a sunflower, an old California license plate, a “golden state” illustration, and a surfer with the Pacific coast highway sign. All these items all have different shapes and textures, and they all don’t make sense together. 

 

Citizen Diptych

After reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in our English class and creating a lyrical essay of our own, we created this Diptych in Design in order to form a synergy between our street photography and language from our lyrical essay. Below is my artist statement for this piece. 

My Lyrical essay, entitled “Thanksgiving,” displays how a holiday that is usually about togetherness somehow turns into a night of rejection and judgment when a young teenage boy comes out as gay to his family. My interview subject gave me insight into how hard it can be to come out as gay to your family and how painful it is to not be accepted by them.  

I chose this photo of a man riding a bike because I thought it represented my passage very well. After coming out as gay, my interviewee emphasized the fact that everyone now just sees him as different from everybody else; they only see him as gay, and because of that, he stands out. And when I looked at the photo, the man riding the bike stood out- being the only biker on the street and surrounded by a bunch of cars. I also really liked the fact that the biker was wearing glasses. Because my passage uses the word “see,” I wanted to use the glasses to be a physical representation of how people might only see someone as gay after they come out.

 In order to edit my photo, I isolated the glasses by leaving them in color and turning the rest of my image into black & white. I then adjusted the brightness and saturation in order to give the glasses a faded, old fashioned look. I ended up cropping my image in order to ensure that I was following the rule of thirds. I also found a text that looked like a typewriter font, and I warped it in order to fit it into the shape of the glasses on the right side.

 

Japanese Stab-binding Book 

In my Design class, we created a Japanese Stab Binding Book with handcrafted book covers using a special Japanese stab binding technique. This book contains Japanese Kanji and lines from my Lyrical Essay, Illustrations in Black India ink on handmade paper made from Japanese newspapers, and watercolor images that I created in Adobe Photoshop. 

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Minimalist Movie Package

For this project, we were instructed to create our own movie and then produce a custom branding packet for a fictitious movie event. Using Adobe Illustrator, I produced a minimalist movie poster, movie premiere invitations, and unique packaging for those tickets. 

My Movie

Titled “The Rink,” my movie takes place in a small town in Canada, where there is a Women’s Club Hockey team and a Men’s Club Hockey team that practice in the same arena. The catch is, there is only one rink for the two teams to share. The Men’s team gets priority over using the rink even though the Women’s team is much more skilled; they have a better record and they have won more championships. The captain of the Men’s team, Chase, and the captain of the girl’s team, Skylar, have never liked each other because of the dispute over the boys getting priority over the rink. They eventually become friends and the Chase starts falling for Skylar. The Men’s team notices that their captain is siding with the Women’s team and being more lenient on giving them ice time on the rink, so they get upset. The two captains eventually fall in love and Chase takes the boy’s team to watch Skylar and the other girls play. After seeing how talented they are, the boy’s team realizes that they are being unfair, so both teams end up getting equal usage of the rink and they all learn to support each other.

What I did

After coming up with this idea for my movie, I created a movie poster, movie ticket, and packaging for the ticket using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. The movie poster, ticket, and packaging was supposed to be minimalist, so in order to achieve that I used only 3 colors on the poster and the ticket- black, white, and light blue. We also created our own font for our movie posters, so I sketched out a font by using Adobe Illustrator that I felt matched the theme of my movie. Along with that, I created a movie ticket shaped like a skate and packaging that looks like ice in order to match the theme of my movie. I then used an X-ACTO knife to cut out the shape of the skate after it was printed and then folded up my packaging around the skate in order to act as an envelope.

 

 

 

English 

This year in English we were required to write a series of essay and reflections on pieces of work that were aimed to give a new perspective. All of these projects fall under the category of a Narrative where we were challenged to either write from someone else’s perspective or write from our own. 

Lyrical Essay

My Lyrical essay, entitled “Thanksgiving,” displays how a holiday that is usually about togetherness somehow turns into a night of rejection and judgment when a young teenage boy comes out as gay to his family. My interview subject gave me insight to how hard it can be to come out as gay to your family and how painful it is to not be accepted by them.  

 

Thanksgiving.

You stare at yourself in the mirror as you button up your red flannel.

It’s Thanksgiving. Your favorite holiday.

As you walk through the kitchen, you catch a whiff of your mother’s pumpkin pie.

Your grandmother smiles and gives you a hug as you enter the living room.

Family.

Love.

Laughter.

Smiles.

Your family is getting ready to eat. You pile food on your plate that your grandmother spent hours preparing.

As you sit down at the table, you take a deep breath.

You wonder if you really need to tell them right now.

 

It can wait.

No, but it can’t.

You don’t have to tell them now.

Just wait.

Your grandmother finishes her prayer.

 

You stare down at your mashed potatoes and gravy as you think about the 2 words you have been holding back from saying out loud for years now.  

You don’t want to ruin Thanksgiving.  

 

But you are tired of waiting.

You have to tell them.

You are done waiting.

Everyone takes their first bite.

    “I’m gay”

You finally said it out loud.

You hear your mother gasp as your grandmother drops her fork on the ground.

Silence.  

It felt like all the air got sucked out of the room.

Your mind is telling you to take it back. Say it was a joke.

A joke. Something funny.

Something they think is funny.

But it’s not funny. It’s you.

It’s who you are.

“You like girls. I KNOW you like girls.”

But you don’t.

That’s not what you just told them.

You are gay.

You know they heard you say it.

But they don’t understand.

 

You make eye contact with your Father. He looks away.

Your Mother gets up and leaves the table.

Your Brother’s mouth hangs open.

Your Sister looks down and fumbles with her napkin.  

Your Grandmother stays quiet.

You get up from the table and walk down the hallway to your room.

 Your bed never looked so inviting.

You jump in and pull the covers over your head.

Curled up in darkness. Lying in silence.

Alone.

Rejected.

Tears.

Quiet.  

You knew this would happen. This is why you held it inside.

You know they don’t like it.

They never will.

They don’t want you to be gay.

 

This is why you didn’t want to tell them.

But you had to. You couldn’t wait any longer.

 

All you want is for them to accept you and continue to love you like they always have.

To see you as they see everyone else.

Now when they look at you, all they will see is

GAY.