Roanin Fisher
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Roanin Fisher
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I think that as a teenager growing up my view of the American dream is wildly different from that of my parent's generation. The standard of the American dream that is present in movies and TV is that of a white picket fence in suburbia just isn't something I really associate myself with, coming from both a broken household and poverty. I Think that naturally, i strive to do better than my parents, as most children do. These factors and the generation gap shaped my view to something I see as more attainable for myself, I see the American dream as buying and owning a midsize house but more importantly becoming successful enough to travel and adventure/ have a life outside of my profession. I don't think that my interpretation is that different from some of the dreams from the three resources I was required to look into for this post. A source I used from Investopedia talks about the original use of the term made by James Truslow Adams in his book Epic of America, his quote for the first use of this now common phrase was” that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” I can relate to this but it's very vague so it could be assumed that many or most people can find something to relate to with Adams early interpretation. Looking at some of the statistics provided in my source YouGov I can see that the percent of Americans who still believe in the American dream is going down at an astonishing rate, this could be a mix of our current political landscape or the general pessimistic attitude America has seemed to adopt. Either way, having a dream to aim for growing up and into adulthood helps shape us into the people we strive to be. My college is a representation of my dream interpretation, I see the American dream as buying and owning a midsized house but more importantly becoming successful enough to travel and adventure/ have a life o0utside of my profession. The house in the woods represents the house I see myself owning in my ideal “dream world”. To complement the other large part of my dream are the plane, beach and hiking trail respectfully, I want to adventure in my life and ironically the American dream for me is leaving America a lot. And to round it off I have two sort of silly pictures one being a fake sign pointing towards the and one final one of someone surrounded by 1 dollar bills which signifies my hope of success and financial stability
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For our final project of the semester in art, we were required to teach the other students on an artistic medium through to workshops, a first and second draft almost. All the basic ones were covered such as watercolor, charcoal, and acrylic, however, my team and I got to work with one that's kinda wacky and may be seen as a bit childish, Collage and mixed media. When I first started researching I began to realize how much of a following this medium has, most pieces being surreal and beautiful such as the work of Ben Giles, a collage artist i looked into during my research. He uses vintage advertisement and modern landscape photography to create science fiction esc creations such as my favorite piece of his, a commission by mash magazine pictured below i think i l earned the majority of the new techniques i came to teach others as well as discover myself stemmed from the fantastical retro futurism work Giles has created. I hadn't realized how much layering mattered in this medium before looking into him, but as you can see it makes all the difference in making the art feel alive. as we started doing our actual workshop it became apparent that my group mates weren't going to be much help in planning or execution, which is fine project based learning means sometimes you have to do more work to pick up slack left behind by group mates this caused there to be a lack of real collaboration. I began planning a super basic workshop where the students get to collage while i talked at them, mentally i created a list of techniques i wanted to teach them which included tying your images together either by horizon lines matching up or doodling sort of "bridges between their chosen photos, ripping paper versus cutting paper, and word collaging. However despite the planning the first workshop was super messy and unorganized as many first drafts tend to be, this coupled with the fact that a fire drill happened right in the middle of our presentation lead to it being less than fantastic. The feedback we received for the first run through helped us streamline it enough where i felt like the second one was a success After doing our presentation and participating in the others we were asked to create a small piece that incorporated 3 or more of the mediums we learned about. my piece is curled into a cylinder because we were low on water color paper and it refused to flatten out, i ended up deciding to let the material do what it wanted to do. As you can see in the above pictures i did end up using collaging as one of my three mediums, i was super eager to use it in my piece because after learning all about it but never really getting to put that knowledge to use, and in a way i still haven't gotten to fully mess around with it yet due to the short time i spent on this piece. I pasted my magazine pieces onto a water color base and used both pen and acrylic to fill in some gaps with "bridges". My artwork reflects my way of creating art where i started with a small thing i wanted to build off of, in this case the windmills. I found a whole double page spread full of them and immediately wanted to do something interesting with them. I could also say that the cylindrical shape of my page shows my ability to go with the flow, to let the materials shape the final art. This seemed like a good end cap on our first semester and i want to see what would happen if we were able to do a bigger project surrounding mixed media. More ResourcesThis Project i was only able to do one of the two art pieces everyone else did. The "final" still life for everyone else, my first one, was an interesting experience for me to complete, starting off I was handicapped with time due to my sickness during the first week of this project so i only got 2 classes of work-time. However, I feel I was able to produce a quality piece demonstrating my ability to see proportion and basic shading with light in the time i did have. My process was pretty straight to the point when it comes to how i went about doing completing it, i started with an outline of everything. i first focused on the mop because i really didn't feel like working on it. Dong this got me comfortable with the piece and got a frustrating aspect out of the way. after the initial outline for one period i quickly shaded the entire page in my second and final period to work on it. some of my edges could have been a little cleaner and my shadows could use some softening but i feel accomplished and proud of my final product.
As an opening to our "chopped" project my chemistry team and i were asked to present our teacher, as well as three judges with a basic appetizer. Having a dry run with a bunch of students cooking using equipment not quite familiar to them was diffidently challenging but it seems to have gotten us comfortable enough to take on our bigger entrees. My team and i chose to make our own mozzarella sticks and marinara dipping sauce to pair, however before we could jump right into cooking we were asked to look into the compounds and chemical formulas of each of our ingredients. The experience of tracking down what everything was called scientifically made me appreciate our more common names for food but also reminded me that we are combining these materials not just throwing things in a pan.
As a class we have been looking at different thematic topics present in the book the one i have researched isolation or alienation. I believe this is a very prominent topic with how the story unfolds, with the creation of Frankenstein's monster victor is horrified about what he has made and runs away in terror. By not acknowledging the creature victor isolates it from the rest of the world, i think this cruel first moments helped to shape the creature into the murderer we see later on.Alienation is probably most present when we get to hear the monsters point of view after its creation. The depiction of it having to figure out that he is an abomination in comparison to other people through the cruelty of the people he meets pushes him to this angry place. Was this alienation the reason for the monsters violence? Looking back at my writing from the beginning and end of last semester i can see that i have improved my abilities and grown from the feedback i have received. I feel as if i have learned many new skills and tricks that i can and have been applying to my writing. The biggest point of feedback and growth i believe i made last semester was a paper i wrote in my world studies class about The Lord of the Flies. After writing that paper and thinking it was perfect i got a ton of feedback telling me it was far from it, at first this made me angry and kind of upset since i had spent so much time and effort writing it but once i got over that hump of being emotional i saw that most of the feedback was guiding me towards improving on skills i didn't know i was weak in. I feel like that paper pushed me forward as a writer and let me view some of my flaws and ways i can improve upon them.
The use of tragic flaw in film and literature has been used to convey a personal feeling of pity or fear for a character often putting them in a dire situations that could lead to their downfall. As a partnership we were asked “Does humankind possess a tragic flaw?”. Me and my partner’s stance on the question of whether or not humankind has a tragic flaw is that we all share many flaws but one of them that stuck out to us is Violence. We found our flaw was one of the easiest to find represented in media, books such as The Hunger Games center their plot around the violence using it to show us how different life in the book is from our own lives. Another great book that represents violence to our age group is Lord Of The Flies, a book that throws a group of British school boys onto a desert island during a time of war after splitting into tribe like groups the boys begin fighting over the tools a resources they have on the island resulting in violence. Our final example is the book The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton it is about the life of a A teen gang in rural Oklahoma, the Greasers are perpetually at odds with the Socials, a rival group. When a few Greasers get into a brawl that ends in the death of a Social member, the boys are forced to go into hiding. Soon the Greasers must contend with the consequences of their violent lives. While some Greasers try to achieve redemption, others meet tragic ends. We decided to choose violence as our big tragic flaw because it’s something that we as a generation see so much of but no one in power finds the issues with starting wars. Our “leaders” get mad at each other and instead of settling it they send thousands of people to go shoot at the other leaders people to make some sort of a point. In recent years we have seen people leave their homes and migrate to escape these wars and battles taking over the places they live. This violent age we are living in has people who use violence as a way to control another person or people, this can be seen as a large country-wide control or the sadly more common case of family violence. We find this is especially tragic when it is the parent of a child who has become violent, often if not always ends in part of the family being emotionally or physically harmed, often ruining their image of one or both of their parents.You can see that the use of violence in the modern world mostly ends up ruining the image of someone,forever labeling them as a violent person which can end up isolating them from people they love. During my last project in my digital media class, I was introduced to Adobe After Effects and the first big problem i came across was how difficult it was to think about what rotating each plane did to my final product.
X plane : If you start messing with the settings of the X plane in after effects you will see that it controls your object moving it either up or down from its original position . Y plane : The Y plane does a similar job to the X plane but instead of moving up and down it goes left and right. Z plane : The Z plane is where everything got a little confusing for me, this gives your object a third dimension and moves along a plane that either has the object close up to your face or way off in the distance. Using these planes combined can lead to interesting angles, giving otherwise 2D pictures a 3D feel, I recently got to explore this with my next project in my class in which we get to take a painting from our art style in our creative studies class and turn it into a 3D loop or gif to show off the skills we have learned this semester One of my favorite hobbies to go do when i'm having a bad day or not feeling like myself is to to get u incredibly early and go hike west-wood hills right as the sun starts to rise. This has become a sorta ritual when its not to wet or muddy for me because it remind s me of how i used to be as a child and its really therapeutic and renewing for my mind.
A major plus to this is that it is a very heavy cardio workout as it is mostly uphill for the hike up and all downhill coming down so it really helps me with my "leg day". As much as I enjoy going up alone and enjoying the sights by myself I also really like having the company of one or two people because it maintains the sorta peaceful silence I enjoy up there here are some pictures i have taken at the top of the hills.
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AuthorMy name is Roanin Xavier Fisher and I am a Senior attending Napa New Technology High School. Archives
February 2020
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