Never Underestimate the Power of The Dork Side

For every six-week grading period at my school, my math teacher assigns us a project. These have included poems about the quadratic formula and secret messages decoded through simplifying equations. And for this grading period, we were assigned to make a game about logarithms with a partner.

Now, I am very fortunate that a good friend of mine from my Nerd Herd is in that class with me, and we got together to make this game. After much observation of our teacher for the past semester, we learned that she is quite the Star Wars fan. And in no way trying to appeal to her interests with the hopes that she'd appreciate our creativity, we decided we would make a Star Wars themed board game about logarithms.

This proved to be more ridiculous than we imagined.

We started with our cards. There are three types--the Yoda Asks cards, the Fortuitous Cards, and the Final Battle Cards. The Yoda Asks cards were where we addressed all of the math concepts, and the other two types of cards were to add an element of chance to the game to make it more engaging.

We then set off to create the directions for the game, which simply brought us to the conclusion that if our game wasn't about logarithms and exponents, it could actually be incredibly appealing. That is not to say that logarithms are not entertaining, but I think an entire game based around them is rather daunting.

We then were able to start on the fun stuff, like making our board and the character pieces. This is what everything ended up looking like:

These are the contents of the game, color coded and all!

Logarithms and Exponents in Space. This is the outside of our box.

The math pieces and directions, both infused with Star Wars trivia and quotes.

Our groovy Millennium Falcon game board.

And finally, our awesome character pieces. 

I had a lot of fun with this project, and I'm beginning to appreciate why my math teacher has us do these projects. They all require us to blend math concepts with art and writing. This process helps to strengthen our grasp on the math portion because one cannot successfully create a game about logarithms if one does not understand how logarithms work. 

And I'll try to remind myself of this when I come home complaining the next time she assigns one of these six-weeks projects.

The Sketchbook Project

Well, after almost four months of working on it, my sketchbook was mailed off to New York.

For anyone who doesn't know what The Sketchbook Project is, here is the website:
http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject2012
Basically, it's a project in which you are sent a Sketchbook with a theme and then you have to send it back to them completed by a certain date after which, all of the sketchbooks go into a collection that goes on tour, and eventually are added into permanent residence at the Brooklyn Art Library.

I signed up for this project and received my Sketchbook in the middle of October and began working on it immediately. After some problems with the paper that the sketchbook came with (it was very flimsy and deteriorated when I put watercolors on it), I decided to rebind my sketchbook with different types of paper that would allow for more variety in my book. Along with this came the idea to film the creation of the sketchbook and put together some artistic documentation of the process.

After months of working on this book, I finally completed it two days before it needed to be postmarked and sent off. I then began the endeavor of scanning the entire book so I could have a copy of it, which took an extraordinarily long time. Then, I allowed my family to look at the book and give me their opinions and feedback. I then packaged and addressed it, and my mother sent it off for me the next day.

My sketchbook was sent away this past Monday, and since I finished it so close to the deadline, not many people got to see it. So, I began editing the footage I had taken while drawing and painting and I have completed my video.

Also, on a side note, I am very dissatisfied with the quality of video that blogspot supplies, so I have decided to make a Vimeo account, which will include the other videos that I've posted on blogspot.

Anyways, here is the link to the video. The songs used are Walking the Dog by Fun., Daylight by Matt and Kim, and Your Hand In Mine by Explosions In The Sky.

http://vimeo.com/36175008

Parting with the sketchbook wasn't as difficult as I expected it to be. I had envisioned that I would fall in love with the art and writing in my book and not want to send it away. But in reality, although I am content with the way it turned out, I am happy to let it go. I realized that in working on it for such a long time, I had funneled a lot of my feelings of the time into it, and in a way it was sort of like an artistic diary. I was glad to let that little chunk of my life become (hopefully) something beautiful that many people will look at and enjoy.

The Nebula Dress

These last few weeks have been crazy for me. I've been busy completing art projects, starting art projects, working on writing projects, planning my school schedule for next year, and simply trying to keep my head above the regular flow of homework. I have not been getting as much sleep as I would like, and my brain seems to be hyper-active and I'm stressing out to no end. But, two weekends ago I set aside my Saturday night to devote simply to being social and going to a school dance.

So let me just star by saying that I love nebulae.

This craze all started last winter when I stumbled across a Christopher Kane nebula dress in a magazine. But, I was absolutely distraught when I saw the incredibly high price of all of these nebula dresses. So, for the next few months I experimented with painting nebulae. This ranged from nebula backgrounds on paintings to creating a pair of shoes with nebula on them.

So after about a year of this obsession, I decided I would take on trying to paint a dress. I finished it on New Years Eve, and it made its first debut that night. 

 And here's the final product! I used a sponge to layer on the colors, and splattered white paint over the skirt for the stars. Then, I glued small rhinestones onto the skirt as well.

So a couple of weeks later, I went to a school dance with the boy next door and ended up having a really good time. I got many compliments on my dress and its originality. And after more than a year of being obsessed with nebula clothing, I have finally created a dress that I absolutely adore and want to wear everywhere.

"Gold Teeth And A Curse For This Town"

While looking through my camera's memory card for clips and images to use for my video documenting my work  on The Sketchbook Project, I came across some old pictures from when I went to the Balloon Fiesta back in October. I had forgotten all about the photographs I took and I had a lovely time looking back through them all this afternoon. A fair amount of my favorites were pictures that compiled into bits of stop-motion animations, so I decided I would put together a short little video of my favorite images and animation sequences.

Now, the moving images of this video are actually individual photographs, shot continuously at a rapid pace, then put onto my computer and into a sequence, played back at 8 frames per second. The other photographs, the still ones, are each set at around 2.3 seconds.

The title for this post, "gold teeth and a curse for this town" is the first line from the song New Slang by The Shins, which is also the song that I chose for the video. This band is a favorite of mine, and I am greatly looking forward to their new album coming out in March. This song is one that I heard back in 2007, and it has been in many playlists of mine since. Now, before this blog post becomes one of me describing my love for The Shins (which definitely could happen), I wanted to explain that this song reminds me of home, therefore I thought it would be very fitting for a video about the Balloon Fiesta, which I have witnessed almost every year.

Creative Frenzy

I have this need to create.

I want to form extraordinary pieces from ordinary things, to feel the ultimate joy in expressing myself in something beautiful. This need cuts through my ability to focus and disrupts my ability to be productive. My fingers are itching to start doodling in the margins of my textbook. I have a Moleskin notebook where I write and sketch things that inspire me, and it is practically oozing, whispering about ideas to me as I try to complete French homework.

Quelle plante menace l'existence de la planete du petit prince?


I can hear it. It's begging me to crack open it's worn spine and spill over the ideas that I haven't wanted to lose.

Pourquoi le petit prince voulait-il un mouton? 


Once I finish these questions on Le Petit Prince, I will start on an art project. I'm promising myself that as a form of motivation to finish this homework. I'm just not sure where to start. I have so many ideas circling through my brain and I can't decide which one to take out and put under a microscope before I transfer it into physical creation.

My ideas seem to be multiplying with my cells as they grow and divide. My need to cast away the French homework and open my box of art supplies taunts me as I try to repress the fact that every pore in my body is whispering to me about the promise of creating art that I will be proud of.

Bisecting the once tenacious nucleus of my being, I'm left with two debating halves of a whole.

The Bubble Time Lapse Video

I adore time lapse videos.

I have three that I'm working on right now, and I'm very hopeful that I'll have time to get around to finishing them. I think that time lapse videos are particularly intriguing with art because it shows the progress in a fast manner, with arms and paintbrushes rapidly flying, while the piece of art remains the constant focus.

This is a time lapse video I made of my process for making my bubble paintings. The song is Chicago by Sufjan Stevens, a personal favorite of mine.

Enjoy!

The Deadline Deviation

On December 22nd, after having been told about the competition from my art teacher, I decided I would participate in the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers' Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. My deadline for the project was January 6th.

I wrote a short story about a man who had to make a choice between responsibility and things that he loves, set into motion by his GPS failing him. After much editing, reconstruction, and proof-reading over my winter break, on the evening of January 5th, I was finished and content with the piece of writing I had created.

I also need to point out that I went back to school on the 4th, so at this time, I was also juggling the piles of homework that was, in my opinion, quite unnecessary.

So, there I was, the night before the official deadline, my writing was completed, and I was ready to submit it. Then, by some whimsical force that remains unknown to me, I decided I wanted to submit a piece of art as well. But, I didn't want to submit one of my paintings that was already finished. I wanted to create something new. I had an idea and I wanted to try it out. So I did.

Once that was finished, I sat down with my dad to submit my work. When I initially researched the project, I thought that everything was to be submitted electronically. But, as we tried to upload my story and painting, we learned that I needed to have a teacher sign off on my work, and send the physical copies of the form to them, postmarked by January 6th.

I will admit I was relatively hysterical at this point.

My stressing wasn't a result of being worried about not receiving an award if my work wasn't accepted, rather it was frustration that I had put so much work into these two things over my winter break and that they wouldn't be accepted.

As to not bore you with the strenuous details of this endeavor, the short of it is that I ran around like crazy the next day and got the signatures I needed and then was able to give the forms to my dad and sister who made a trip to the post office and sent them off for me.

When I finally got home after school and an entire afternoon of drama-related activities, I was exhausted. My brain was simply frazzled from the stress of the past 24 hours. It was the sort of tired where I could feel it in my limbs, my head was heavy, and my eyes were constantly losing focus.

I need to point out that I don't usually leave things until the night before because I don't work well under pressure. So, with my Sketchbook Project deadline being on the 31st of this month, I intend to submit it much earlier.

Which means I need to go work on it.

Time to be inspired.

Oh, also, here is the painting I submitted.