About Me!

Hello! Welcome to my Showcase website! My name is Nicole Hu and I am a senior at Freestyle Academy taking Design, Digital Media, and English 4 Honors.

Aside from Freestyle, I am very active in visual and performing arts at MVHS. As Secretary of Dance Spectrum, and a part of Dance Spectrum’s advanced dance class, I help to facilitate a creative dance environment and have choreographed multiple jazz and hip hop pieces. In addition to dance, I am very passionate about music and love to play the piano.

As a half Chinese – half Korean American, I am very passionate about sharing Asian culture with others. For the past two years, I have been Public Relations officer of Mandarin Club, which works to inclusively bring students of MVHS closer through Chinese culture, tradition, and service opportunities.

This coming fall, I will be attending Cornell University majoring in Fashion Design and Management in order to make my dream of working in fashion advertising or wearable technology become a reality.

Graphic Novel

In this unit, I created a graphic novel, titled “Lost Love” about a character who longs to reconnect with music. It was based off of a flash fiction, or extremely short narrative, which I wrote in my English class junior year.

My Flash Fiction

“It was raining that night. Pouring. Tears dripping from the eyes of the clouds above, falling down and smacking the gray, concrete street. A cold droplet pierced his cheek, and he looked up to feel the biting collisions on his face.

He had spent the day just like every other, staying late at the school library until dark had fallen without his realizing. Every other day he would have gone straight home, only to lock himself in his room to study more. But on this stormy day, he found himself just outside the old music school. What led him there, he did not know.

He peered into the window, and although the room was dark, he could faintly see the body of the old, stand-up piano. Dust and mothballs had collected, yet it was the same as it had been seven years ago.

His eyes blurred out, and when they refocused it was on his reflection in the window. How different his reflection had been the last time he had been there. He closed his eyes as he tried to remember what it had been like back in those days. The days he had taken for granted.

When he opened his eyes again, the mirage of a young boy had replaced his reflection in the window. The reflection stood there with piano books too heavy for his small arms, and a light of innocence in his youthful eyes. The reflection smiled gently behind the boy, and the boy curiously turned to look back.

But as he rotated around himself, the world and the city around him seemed to fade away and disappear. All that was left was the rain and the old, stand-up piano. Cautiously, he approached his once-familiar friend and traced his fingers along its rough edges and curves. A lot had changed since their last encounter; his height was now taller, and he no longer felt worthy to freely touch the ivory keys after neglecting them for so long. Yet he sat down and tentatively placed his stiff fingers on the keyboard. He feared it would be unfamiliar to him.

He pressed down gently, yet longingly. His fingertips yearned to touch the ivory keys again which were once family, but he was greeted with a sound like the whelp of a dog left behind. Again he tried, hands stiff from years of neglect and the cold of the wind.

The piano welcomed him graciously.

And once again he looked up at the rain, and this time it felt like the stars descending.”

My illustrations

As a PDF:

NicoleH-Graphic-Novel

As images (JPG):

Fashion Illustration

I created fashion illustrations for two projects at my time in Freestyle. The first is the Explorations project and the second is the Zenith project.

For the explorations project, I essentially learned how fashion illustrations were created and how they are used to promote an idea in a cohesive and professional matter.

The Zenith project is the last big project I did in my two years at Freestyle Academy of Communication Arts and Technology. For this project, I was given 10 weeks to design my own project and explore whatever I am interested in. I chose to create a fashion brand by designing my own original clothing and constructing them.

The idea for my brand came to me after finish my research paper on how fashion brands and businesses respond to social and political movements of the time. Inspired by the way brands such as United Colors of Benetton or Chanel were able to ignite important political discussions with fashion and advertising, I created New Dust. The name New Dust represents the way that these “new” problems we are facing today actually stem from deep rooted, older problems, and people associate “dust” with old things. Additionally, dust is constantly covering items if they are left alone, much like how our social and political problems will continue if we continue to turn a blind eye to them.

With this brand idea in mind, I created three pieces with hope that they would be cohesive, fashion forward, and bring awareness to a social cause that is currently affecting our society.

Showcase