Roanin Fisher
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Roanin Fisher
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In Digital design lab we had a return of my personal favorite project from last year, creating a piece to present in January for the Napa Lighted Arts Festival. However despite working on it last year I got to take on an entirely different role this time around, I took on the position of co-leading the entire project with my classmate Francisco. I didn't really know what to expect of the leadership role when I put my hat in the ring but I was determined to apply the leadership skills I have gained in other classes, and in extra curricular events. As the project began it was a lot of scrambling to get a schedule in order and provide deadlines for the groups, once that was completed though we were able to really get things in motion, most of the teams had immediate ideas they wanted to run with and it all started to come together.
One thing that I do wish had gone better was how long we spent on the planning phases, this is an important aspect of the whole project but I believe that if we had sped this aspect up a little more it would have lead to A: more work on the project itself and B: less conflict within the groups. When the groups kept talking about and tweaking their design it made some divides and hurt within a couple of the teams. If this could have been avoided I would say that the entire project was smooth and easy.
All in all I was really grateful to have the ability to not only be a part of something this impressive but to actually lead the whole thing.
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As I enter my last semester in high school its nice to have a sort of downtime in my classes, the class I worked the hardest at last year is digital design lab. As one of the student leaders in the class it was a stressful first semester and now that I have been given some time I feel like I can finally work on some of the graphics stuff that I want to get better at. For my passion project i'm using a passage from one of my favorite books, Ecotopia (see left) and creating a digital matte painting/ background plate based on the descriptions of the area. In this book the POV character is a reporter visiting a transformed California and recounting how things have changed. I feel like this is a wonderful depiction of a brighter tomorrow and there isn't a big enough following of the book for there to be art depicting any of it so I am taking it upon myself to create some. I started out by picking a good reference photo of market street to build off of as well as chose an art style I want to emulate with my final piece. These paintings are by Kazuo Oga, the art director for studio Ghibli, the watercolor look and colors he uses produce so much light into the landscapes and I want that to be the feeling given off by my work. The big spin on this project however was the inclusion of disciplines present from something other than the one we were currently working in. For me since i'm doing digital painting I have decided to choose photography since the two mediums have similar principles and I want to expand on unity. "Unity describes the visual relationship between elements in a photograph. It helps create a cohesive image. Using similar colors or tones, concepts or elements cultivates a sense of unity. ... This, in turn, allows a photographer to take greater control of the image." this is the top description given on google and i feel like it could really work to expand on what i am already working on.
Create-a-thon 2020 was the continuation of our school wide design thinking challenge that we started last year. Since we were doing the same project again my class decided that things needed to be tweaked in order to have the event run smoother than last year as well as making the event have a larger reach.
We accomplished the latter goal by opening up the event to people all around the world trough the use of our new 'Global Showcase'. The showcase was created using the same rules and theme given to our students but posting them online and sending them to educators in different states/countries. All of these submissions were then put into a folder alongside the New Tech artwork (see left below) before we projected it onto our wall at the Lighted Arts Festival. We managed to stay connected to other campuses running the event along side us through use of live streaming and video calls(See right below)
I think that the inclusion of a larger community working on our project gave the whole event some more weight, rather that just being a thing done at our school it became an event that reached around the globe. Some of my favorite parts of the wrap up for this project was just getting to see what people outside of our school created by following our curriculum.
From what i was able to observe the students really did enjoy the whole day much more and i feel like we got more submissions due to that fact. When/if this project is done in the future i hope the class chooses to do teams through grade level again because that was definitely part of the incentive for people to actually show up day of
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Looking back on the whole event, planning and execution, I can honestly say that the second iteration was so much better than the first, im excited to see where future students will take this project and im incredibly proud of my classmates and myself for accomplishing such a huge event twice without any prior experience.
Over the course of our figure drawing block, we did a multitude of different sketches, some longer and some shorter. We were pushed to not only draw but also be a model for the class and/or smaller groups. We were also required to differ in our choice of materials whether it be graphite pencil, oil pastel, or chalk. I found that each material had both its pros and cons, for instance, oil pastel was great at doing the quick, small, and less detailed poses but when it comes to the longer, and more detailed pieces the malleable nature of the pastel causes it to dull fast and make it harder to use it for small aspects of your model. My process was definitely one of growth, I never really draw people on my own merit and so I tend to stay away from the whole subject of scale and proportion. At first, I struggled with the whole project, throwing away many of my first drawings because I didn't like them, but as I put more and more effort into them and got comfortable with my drawings I actually pivoted to actually enjoying the time we spend creating these figures quite a lot. The two big areas I grew in over the course of this block were proportion and an appreciation of my own work. All in all, I think this project was one of the ones that has benefited me the most as an artist. Although I don't believe ill be doing any more figure drawing on my own time I feel it helped me to know that if I had to I wouldn't be too uncomfortable with the idea and strengthened my understanding of proportion/ scale For the Culminating project for my Art 2 class we were given three different rules to follow from our peers based on the previous work we had done.Each rule had to challenge you as an artist and break your norms. The first of my three rules given was it had to be a figure or person since the person assigning that rule knew that i did not enjoy/ don't enjoy drawing people. My second rule was that it couldn't be digitally done since many of my previous works i had to show were done using Adobe Illustrator. Last but not least my final rule was that was not allowed to have a reference image to base my work off of, i honestly don't know why this one was given to me rather than to just make my project a little harder. Although i wasn't allowed to use a reference for the actual duration of creating my artwork i used the classic Bigfoot pose as an inspiration to create my "figure". I believe that my overall final piece ended up somewhat what i wanted to, however i really wish i had either picked a smaller surface or had more time because it isn't as detailed as id like it to be. A large part of the feedback i received was that the pose felt a little off or disproportionate but i think that's to be expected of a no reference drawing especially for someone who doesn't regularly draw people, or in this case people-like figures. With the feedback i received i was able to incorporate some improvements adding a bit more texture to Bigfoot for my final piece which i believe improved my work greatly.
Over the course of this school year i have grown and changed as an artist, many of the projects challenged what i had established as my norms as an artist. By having my peers review my work and give me rules for the last art piece i created in this class it allowed me to continue growing. This final piece felt like a happy grey area for me as an artist where i could rely on my textured nature scenes i have become so comfortable creating and the new frontier presented by figure drawing and all the challenges that come with that. For this individual HitREcord centric project, I managed to complete 2 and ½ of my projects I set out to do, the completed ones being a fake album cover and a space-themed poster and my incomplete project, a postcard from hell. Overall this project felt like it lacked structure, I understand that planning a project solo is an important skill I need to learn but I really hated how it all came together. My main issue with this block of time was the platform of HitREcord, many of the challenges felt like the same thing and uninspired, I know this made it hard for my peers and I to become excited about what we were creating, making ending the project feel lackluster and disappointing especially when compared to work we got to do throughout the first semester. Now that I have gotten my more negative views of the experience of my chest I'll talk a little about the parts I think worked really well in this project for me. First off it was nice to have complete control over the final product for the first time this year, generally, I have really enjoyed my teams and the products we created but jumping through hoops to have everyone's work tie together to a point we were all happy was never easy. The second( and arguably more important) thing that felt good about this process was the new things I was able to pick up on and learn about Illustrator, I think that broadening my “digital tool belt” has and always will be the goal of this class. However, with the new tricks and tools, I was using came new challenges I had to learn to overcome which forced my hand on using some techniques I ended up enjoying way more than my original approach. in the below photos you can see a slideshow of my sort of process with this piece In part one of our project, the cooler evidence leads us to the correct lake via the different and unique Ph levels present in the three different potential lakes, we were also able to determine that Mary K. could not have been sunk in said cooler. After pinpointing the correct lake part two of our project found us investigating a sunken delivery truck owned by one of our suspects, Elizabeth G.Our task was to tell the police if they could safely remove the delivery truck due to a faulty deployed airbag threatening explosion if the pressure differential became too great. After removing the delivery truck from the lake we were given a new crime scene to investigate, from the scene we were able to link the trace elements found in the truck and surrounding area to traces of those same elements to our suspects, placing Gladys V and her son Gerald V potentially at the scene due to cocaine being found on both her and in the truck. Moving on to part 4, we were finally given the body of Mary K., we were asked to perform a toxoligy analysis which revealed to us the cause of death, a lethal overdose of iodine-131.After reviewing all of the evidence we believe that Gerald V. tortured and ultimately killed Mary K. after finding out that she dumped his stash of cocaine into the lake via the sunken delivery truck.
docs.google.com/document/d/1fcks9F8D6-yX2k3aZBFmNBUvNdGi35088wvKIZH66rY/edit?usp=sharing The art piece was one of the first ones I've done where there was a set theme we had to follow, that being said I really disliked the soft guidelines that went along with the introduction of a theme. At first, the theme really didn't connect with me, I just couldn't figure out a way to display The Upside of Down without doing something overused or uninspired. My interpretation of the topic was more emotional than literal. To me, The Upside of Down sounded like a good thing happening with or because of a bad thing, in my eyes the obvious “bad” thing that would resonate with someone living in the valley was the recent fires that we all endured and the “good” that came of that was the healthy new-growth that has been springing up in the already burnt forests. The Goal of my art was to convey a sense of hope for rehabilitation in the valley which i believe that i achieved moderately well. The actual process i went through is pretty straight forward and i had planned it from the begining to go this way. As you can see the actual piece itself is staggered in height, my main goal was to create a false sense of movement with the paralax effect but it ended up not working the way i intended and created nice depth and shadow instead. The seperate water color pieces are actually glued onto foam board with varying thicknesses in order to make the scene feel more natural. The part i struggled most with was the foreground and the framing of the newgrowth sprout, it kept getting lost among the trees and background until i gave it a brighter green coat of paint. The part of the piece i feel worked out the best is the trees, watercolor layers worked in a beautiful way creating the bark look on each of them.
To me, it feels like the New Tech Create-a-Thon was a very personal project, and i think i speak for many of my classmates when i say that. The fact that we were able to pull the entire event off without any big mishaps is really incredible, especially if you consider the lack of experience in running an event like this. A few of my classmates and I was able to work behind the scenes and we came into school the Saturday before the big day so that the school would be ready come Monday morning.Working with some of the few people in our class that really wanted the whole event to go smoothly mad me start to really appreciate the whole even and the work that had been done to prep it, so when Monday morning came i was actually really excited to launch the event with another classmate, Sam Sparks. Being so excited to see how the day was going to go while telling the school about what they would be doing made Sam and I's opening feel very energetic, at least from the stage. The actual event from that point on was a whirlwind of small problems and physically running around the school, but the part that felt the most important was the networking and connections i made with the Adobe folk who came and helped/observed the day. Most if not all of the Adobe representatives who were here for the event expressed how impressed they were with the day and how amazed they were that this was our first time running through this event.The Aftermath of this project has created a positive place for more events like this to take place in the future, the response from the group of children we brought in as well as the students who was amazing and I'm looking forward to potentially creating another event similar to this next year. Starting out with this project I just sort of feel un-organized, I think that transitioning from the planned out large group projects to something more personal and self driven has felt abrupt. This abrupt change isn't a bad thing but it has and will still take some getting used to, I have to admit I'm a bit nervous to take responsibility for getting everything done myself without anyone to fall back on if I make a mistake or don't understand how to do what I'm doing fully . As of right now, I am looking into 3 projects that caught my eye depending on how fast or slow I complete these I may seek out a few new ones to fill up the rest of my time in this project. I picked my favorite of the 3 to begin working on first as a way to ease myself into the other 2, the project is to create a fake album cover/poster for a fake band of your creation. I think this spoke to me so much because music is such a big part of my life and I've always loved the small details in the covers of some of my favorite albums. I'm hoping that I am going to be able to create something I am actually proud of rather than something I've made to get a good grade or recognition from a teacher |
AuthorMy name is Roanin Xavier Fisher and I am a Senior attending Napa New Technology High School. Archives
February 2020
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