Projects

ACS Art Show

The Ashland City Schools Fine Arts Show is a show put together by the Ashland High School chapter of The National Art Honors Society. We help pin up art, set up display boards in our gym, and get our stations ready. Everyone involved has some sort of job during the show, whether that be selling art at our artist market, face painting, live painting, making balloon animals, or acting as a docent. When the show is over, we tear down and help reorganize. Most of NAHS is student run, with our art teachers supervising and facilitating. Our art teachers say year after year that they couldn't run the show without the work that we students do.

In 2023, a friend of mine suggested we add a balloon animal station to the art show. The art show had done face painting and live painting for a few years, but we figured balloon animals would be a good addition to the show. It ended up being extremely popular, and we ran out of balloons several times throughout the weekend. That friend has since graduated, leaving me to take over running balloon animals. For two years I’ve created my own little branding, taught people how to make balloon animals, and managed a small team of helpers. It's been a really enlightening experience on how to communicate and work with others. I had a lot of fun with it and look forward to seeing what I can put together in the future.

Ashland High School Studio Mural

Since my freshman year in high school, I’d been wanting to leave my mark on my art studio. There were a few murals in the room already, but I had been staring at a specific blank spot on the wall, and senior year, with two weeks left before graduation, I was able to create something that I am very proud of to this day.

The idea for my mural came from a conversation towards the end of my Junior year between me and my art teacher at the time, Mr. Dedrick; we were reviewing the overarching theme I had developed in my printmaking pieces that year, and as I finished talking about one of my stranger pieces, he told me to “keep thinking weird,” and brought up other similar art pieces and artists. His statement stuck with me, and it aligns with one of my favorite things about art, there isn't any right way to do it, and it can be practically anything. I wanted to make that into a mural to encourage others to try new things and to show people that it's okay to be weird.

For the words, “Keep” and " Thinking”, I chose Times New Roman, as it is a classic and very standard typeface, and painted the letters black to allow for more emphasis on the word “Weird”, which featured a different typeface for each letter. I also based each letter on different pieces of art to highlight the different media and ways of thinking that encompass the meaning of creativity.

Reboot Animation

In addition to my evaluation, I wanted to make a larger animation and video piece. I wanted to explore the style of rotoscoping, and the beginning of the video starts out with a rotoscope of my eyes that cuts into the actual video I animated over. The rest of the video plays with different drawings and versions of myself, the idea that the file has corrupted but that file is me. It has to cycle through the people I used to be to get to where I am now, and even then it's still glitching. It's a strange thing, and I wasn't quite sure what direction I wanted it to go, only that it had to be weird. What I ended up with, was something weird, and something that makes me reflect on myself and who I used to be. It's hard to describe, but I enjoyed the process and learned a lot about animation, and myself.

Animation Evaluations

Animation Program Review .pdf

After the creation of my animated eyeball, I was curious about other animation programs. In the past I’ve used Procreate and Adobe Animate; neither are perfect and I wanted to see what else is out there. I created a list of values to evaluate on a scale of 0-5 for each program, those being: the adjustability of the framerate, whether or not there's a frame counter, if there's adjustable onion layers, if there's an adjustable universal background, how well hold frames work, the ease of frame duplication, the export options, and how relatively user friendly the program is. I looked at four programs, including the ones listed above. To aid in my evaluations, I created short test animations for each program, and compiled them as well. It was really interesting to compare different programs especially because I mostly work with Adobe programs. I enjoyed the process and I believe I’ve come up with interesting data that could be useful for others.

Iris the Animated Eyeball

Iris the Animated Eyeball was created for the annual Halloween special that airs on my schools video announcements. I was one of three animators, with each of us creating a simple spooky character, animating them separately, and having someone compile them into a cohesive scene. I chose to continue to develop my character and created a few more small scenes with him. I’d never delved this deep with frame by frame animation before, and while I'm absolutely not a master, I did learn a lot about the process and get comfortable doing it, and create some very fun clips of my character. To the side are early drawings of Iris, and below is a clip of the special he was created for.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse