Conceptual
Introduction
For the conceptual project, Juniors answer the question “How can I use unconventional forms to express myself?”. Through this process, they develop critical and abstract thinking and communication skills, as well as learning to use modern professional equipment like DSLR cameras, Tascam Audio Recorders, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier Pro, Adobe Audition, WordPress, and Google apps. The project encourages risk taking in creative settings, through poetry, music, art, and web production, and allows students to explore and develop their personal style of creativity and aesthetic
I value that Freestyle gives me the opportunity to learn about myself and grow my personal creativity. Each project we are assigned connects to what we are doing in our other classes, and this gives me the opportunity to approach the same concept in different ways. This has helped me learn more deeply about each topic and learn about my own likes and dislikes.
Photo Haiku
For the photo haiku, we were assigned a concept statement, mine being “I exploring the feeling of amazement through destruction.” We then created a haiku to portray this statement and then paired the poem with a photo that expressed the feelings brought with the haiku.
The production of the haiku video taught me many things about using Adobe Premier Pro that I had never before thought about or thought I would eventually know how to do. I now know how to edit images and text in videos, and look forward to using these skills in the future.
“Why art?” Essay
In the “Why Art?” essay, we answered the titular question by connecting three pieces by an artist of our choice to a main thesis. Before the essay writing, we explored multiple different artists as a class, read the play “Red” about Mark Rothko, and visited the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. We then read multiple articles that each made different claims about why art matters and chose one to connect our essay to.
Below is an audio recording of my Why Art Matters essay:
In addition to the essay, we presented our research and analysis in a Why Art Matters presentation. The goal of this presentation was to inform those who did not read our essay about why we each think art matters, and show viewers how the art pieces we chose support our thesis. Below is my Why Art Matters presentation.
Overall, the Why Art Matters assignments allowed me to learn about a variety of artists that I had previously never heard about. I was able to expand my knowledge and learn why art is important to me, as well as why it matters to each of my classmates.
Photoshop Blend Mode Editing
For our photoshop blend mode editing assignments, we learned how to enhance photos using Photoshop. This required experimenting using many different photos, and types of blend modes to get different effects.
Design Projects
In Design, we had two major projects in the Conceptual unit. The first was finding letters of our name in nature and architecture. We then had to take photos of them, edit them, and put them together to spell out our name. The second project was composing a photo that portrayed the two feelings in our conceptual statement, mine being “exploring the feeling of amazement through destruction.”
Black and White Name
Conceptual photo
For the conceptual photo project, we had to compose a photograph using two objects. For me, one of the objects had to represent amazement and one of them had to represent destruction.
The objects that I chose to feature in my photo were a house of cards and a prism that is casting colored light. It is widely known that a house of cards takes a lot of work to create but can become a pile in less than a second. I chose the house of cards to represent destruction due to the fragility of the structure, and the frustration that is felt when a handbuilt creation suddenly turns to nothingness. To represent amazement, I chose to have a prism in the sunlight so that it was casting rainbow light into the composition. To me, prisms are incredibly beautiful in the sunlight and cause a feeling of awe when they cast rainbows onto the surfaces around them. I also chose to put some glitter on the table because glitter adds an element of mysticism, contributing to the “amazement” part of the piece. For the location, I wanted to find somewhere with natural light so that the prism would cast rainbows, because I discovered that rainbows only appear if the prism was in direct sunlight. This limited the number of locations that were available to me, so I chose to have a neutral background to emphasize the rainbows, glitter, and cards.
Before editing, my photo was zoomed out and did not have as much contrast. To change this, I cropped the image so that the prism intersected with one of the lines to follow the rule of thirds. Then, in Photoshop, I created more contrast between the shadows and light by creating a “curves” adjustment layer and a “levels” adjustment layer. These changes created a more interesting looking composition by following the rule of thirds and having a range of values.