What I Learned in ART 1070

At the beginning of this semester, the extent of my experience with art was making a few basic illustrations on Illustrator that I sometimes edited on Photoshop and used for my websites. I had never experimented with text art, and did not even know generative art was a thing! This course introduced me to so many new forms of art including Becher grids, video mashups, and Kitsch-lr art. My favorite part about this course was watching and critiquing the documentary on copyright laws. 

The hard skills I developed in this course include video editing on Photoshop and making my own music, both are two things I had never tried before! The soft skills I developed were the ability to give and received feedback. I definitely did not handle criticism well before but now I understand the importance of it and welcome it.

My ultimate goal is to become a UX Engineer and this course has definitely helped me develop a lot of useful skills for the industry! Especially our assignment on web design, which is extremely useful for me professionally. I hope to hone my graphic design skills, especially with SVGs, so I can be a successful UI designer and really bring my visions to life.

One of the projects I am extremely proud of this semester is the Becher grid assignment. I had so much fun trying to find objects that looked similar, but were different enough to look visually appealing. I enjoyed the challenge of making a grid without using software like PicMonkey, as I usually do. Even though it took more effort, the grid was more customizable and I was extremely happy with the result.

I worked on so many fun assignments this semesters and I enjoyed learning to use new free online software. I definitely hope to use the Flame Painter tool and the generative art tools we used in this course for some of my own personal projects in the future. 

I have very high standards with my art, so I wasn't really content with most of what I did this semester. The two pieces of art that I believe were "successful" were: 1) my generative self-portrait 2) from my Urban Landscapes (Edited) album, the image I took of the pink clouds in the sky. I like the former mainly for aesthetic reasons. By choosing to not trace my eyes, I believe I made the black and white image look very mysterious. I love the latter because of the contrast between the dreamy pink clouds and the green grass beneath it that "grounds" the viewer. Through both assignments, I worked on developing my ability to use color and details (or lack of  thereof) to tell a story.