Month: October 2016

Roel Martinez presented information on Spring Registration. He also just introduced himself as an academic counselor who is available for any help or questions. Roel is my counselor so I was already familiar with him. In fact, I already knew all the information he presented, because I recently had my appointment with him on this subject. He already walked me through the registration process. However, I did know he was a musician. I do not really know how all the guitar information had to do with the rest of the presentation, but I am nonetheless glad he presented it, because I personally have been toying with the idea of picking up electric guitar. I emailed him afterwards about the guitar place he mentioned. I also had a somewhat recent interaction with Meghan Ryan, who presented study abroad information. I was familiar with all the information she presented, but it was good to hear it again, as it is a lot of information. She was so helpful in helping me to be able to go to Costa Rica. Ysenia Valdez presented information on Cabra, a student-led fashion magazine. I was semi-interested, because I was almost a fashion design major at another college. However, I did not care for the fashion being presented in the magazine, and I would have been more interested if participants designed or created the clothes, but they said they mostly borrow the clothes. Marissa or Shelby presented a club for design majors or anyone interested in design for that matter called Command G. I thought the title of the club was quite creative and I have some love and respect for all different arts related majors. However, it just was not for me. Brittany Fucik presented information of the upcoming art club. I am for sure going to join this club when it comes together. As a college student, I was glad to hear it was not too committal, in the sense that it met once every other week. I am comfortable with committing to that. I cannot wait to see all the activities we would do in that club.

1. I have a pretty planned future—I’m a planner. And I make sure that all my life plans are centered on me and what I want to do in my gut, not what anyone else wants me to do, with all due respect to my parents and acquaintances. Done of the things that I plan to do are those things that you kind of have to talk yourself into liking. These are things that would bring me closer to myself and allow me to sleep at night. I am very ambitious, therefore I have several things I want to do with my life. I want to tour the world with my Christian Rock band, Tears of the Sun. I want to open a fashion line called Lunaresque. Each unique design is reversible, with a positive quote inside. I want to be a free-lance artist. I want to sell prints of my artwork online, in a shop called Luna Ray’s Creations. I want to change my name to Luna Ray Solis. I want to live in Austin, and live in my beach house in California in the summers. I want to write books. I want to learn more instruments. I want to use my teaching license to travel the country, teaching in one state a couple of years, then trying another state. I want to travel as much as I can. In regards to a husband and kids, whatever God wants for me, I’m not going to force anything.
2. I am actually already set up to study abroad. I am going to Costa Rica in the summer, I am so excited. But I am open to other travel abroad opportunities in the future. Summer ones would be awesome, or the study abroad things that are like a couple of weeks. I am going to go to these because I cannot commit to the semester-long ones. I would like to go to Japan or Italy or almost anything else for that matter.
3. I am not yet in student groups, but I want to join an orchestra ensemble and Literami, or the Literary Magazine Club here. I definitely want to be in the art club whenever that comes together. I would love to see a Poetry club! I know Literami includes poetry, prose, art, etc. But I would love to see a specifically poetry centered club. It would be cool if I started one.

Camille Dolins touched on several different artistic endeavors she has undertaken. This ranged from her her botanical studies, BtoB marketing services, CreateJoy.com, and most notably, Lucine, an Alternative Way to Unwind. I liked her energy and respected her dedication, as exemplified in her going above and beyond for her senior project (Lucine) for several months. Abbas Deidehban could have gone over more material if there were not as many technical difficulties as there were. He showed us a website of somethings he’s worked on. The website had a lot of movement going on. I did not care for his slightly bizarre style.

1. I most related to Camille Dolins because I also have dealt with depression and anxiety and try to overcome it with through creating. I agreed with her that medication messes up your body and is hardly ever effective. I do believe that there are healthier ways to heal than with medication. That being said, I hope that Lucine, An Alternative Way to Unwind, eventually gets rereleased, because I think many people could deeply benefit from it.
2. Abbas Deidehban surprised me because of his eclectic work. The macho, yellow shark charcter surprised me, I haven’t seen any character like that before. It kind of freaked me out, though.
3. When Camille Dolins said that her reason for not running Lucine currently is because she would feel wrong telling others to take care of themselves and their health when she was not doing the same for herself. The lesson in that is that you need to pause and take care of yourself even when you have all these plans and when several people are wanting more from you.

The fourth film, Last Year in Marienbad, has an unusual sequence of events, this however, contributes to the mood and meaning of the film as a whole. It mostly alternates between past and present as the man (no names of the characters are included in the film) speaking to the woman about what happened between them at about that time to previous year. At first , I thought it would be boring, what will the sluggish opening shots of the hotel and the somewhat depressing description of it. This was followed by the guests watching a conclusion of a play of two lovers deciding to be together. I later would connect the events of the play as a sort of foreshadowing. After the play, the film shifted from several people’s conversations, until finally it settles on the one that the movie will be about: a couple dancing. The man is insisting that they met the previous year, but the woman insists that she’s never seen him before. I began to find it engaging when I found a pattern of alternation between events. I think this contributed to the confused, mysterious mood of the film. Also, certain scenes repeated. That made me wonder what was the significance of that scene that it was repeated in this instance in the conversation. When these patterns started to pick up, I was engrossed in piecing together what really happened, which is the point of a mystery movie. In the end though, the woman finally decides to leave her husband or significant other with her lover, who was the man speaking with her for most of the film. This can be connected to the conclusion of the play from the beginning, which I thought was just a random, scene setting kind of thing.

Part 1: Complete the skills inventory & action plan questions below, and post to your blog.

SKILLS INVENTORY (copy and paste questions into your blog)

For each class ask yourself the following:

• My greatest strengths in Rhetoric and Composition include: my ability to embed quotes, take notes, being able to explain concepts.
• For greater success in this course, I need to: Ask more questions about the details of assignments because they include several parts and formats.

Computer skills:

• My computer skills include: EXCEL, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint.
• I still need to learn: the intricacies and shortcuts of Photoshop. Not really for Rhetoric and Composition, but for Visual Studies 1 and just in general.

Research & writing skills:

• My greatest strengths as a researcher/writer include: Having a good flow of ideas and the inclusion of transition words and phrases, a thorough understanding of the content.

I need to work on these aspects of research and writing: keeping my Work Cited Pages alphabetized, having more paragraphs and organization in my essays.

• I learn best & accomplish most when: I work on my own and not in groups. When I’ve taken good notes.

ACTION PLAN

Choose one class that you are struggling with or are not doing as well as you could.

Now make a list of 10 ways you could improve your performance in this class.

Don’t forget to submit the url of your finished blog post.

1. Ask more questions.
2. Do readings with more time in advance.
3. Read readings twice for a deeper understanding.
4. Break down writing projects into smaller, more manageable pieces.
5. Maybe just start projects the day they are assigned even if the due date is some ways away.
6. Read over my notes right after class, as I am trying to get into the habit of doing for all my classes.
7. Get the numbers of some of my classmates for revising each other’s work outside of class.
8. Freewrite when I get stuck.
9. Be self-aware so I would have a better idea of how long it would take me to do something so that I can plan and pace myself better.
10. Take advantage of the free Writing Center and make some appointments.

 

1. The goal of the assignment was to pull from an archive of over forty pictures we took along South Congress and create digital collages that do not have chaos but are arranged and placed in way that would create visual harmony.

2. I attempted to achieve this harmony by manipulating color. For the first collage, I chose the pictures from my archive that had rustic colors (blacks, greys, browns). In my second collage, I wanted to use my several red images, but I realized that only one color would be a little visually boring. Hence, I decided to add light blue in the form of clouds raining down the red images.

1.I think the colors did succeed in creating harmony. I like the concept of turning a collage into a new picture, into a new concept, which was the raining clouds.

2. The weakest aspect is the amount of images. Both collages needed a higher amount of images according to the criteria of the assignment. Also, I needed to have cut into the images a little more.

3.It could be strengthened with a little more complexity. The concept were solid, there just needed to be more of them. It could have improved greatly with more concepts, more images, and more cutting.

4. It could have been improved with more images and more cutting so that the images are more abstract. The rainclouds collage especially could have been improved with more raindrops. I feel it had a lot of potential, but would have been stronger if there was more of an abundance of images of varying sizes. Also, I could have created some depth if I had some of the raindrops partially covering each other.

5. These collages were only a shell of what I had envisioned. What caused me some challenge was the technical skill the assignment required, as I am still relatively new to photoshop. However, challenge is the only way to growth and I plan to learn as much as I can, especially in my one of my weaknesses in the world of art, which is the technological aspect. I know the next time I do a similar project, I will have more success because I would have more experience and would have learned even more skills and shortcuts in photoshop.

To keep the collages from feeling chaotic what with the multiple images of differing shapes and sizes, I attempted to create harmony through the manipulation of color. In Collage 1, I had mostly blue images. Since all the images were shades of the same color, blue, I played with shapes, such as the shreddy images on the left side of the image and the crescent moon shapes in the top right corner. Collage 2 has mostly rustic colors: greys, blacks, and browns. Collage 3 has massive brown and grey figures to frame the bubbles and to bring out their brighter colors (greens, yellows, etc.). Collage 4 was mainly red images but I thought that would have been a little visually boring. So I decided to add a light blue in the form of clouds, raining down cuts of the red images.

 

Part1- I was a little motivated when the speakers were presenting. This is because using your degree and finding a job felt a little more tangible and reachable seeing someone somewhat close to your age, just a few steps ahead, rather than a professor who already has a degree and have found a career and has been established already. Faith had good content, but I feel she should have opened up a little more. She had good material so she should have exerted more confidence and pride. She should have shown off with pride all she has accomplished and learned. I loved the enthusiasm of the second speaker (the Aliens girl). She gave practical advice, such as always doing a background check on whoever offers you a job. The interactive game studies guys were somehow charismatic in an honest, funny way. I am not into gaming but I think they broke down the technicalities and steps pretty well. The Art major, Education minor girl I said particular attention to, because I am also going into art education. She could have had a little more enthusiasm I think, but she also gave practical advice about which classes you should take (have a balance of both art and education classes, don’t only focus on one).

Part2- Websites

1 http://www.lindseystirling.com/home/. I love that the texts are multicolored and that they all are of one color theme. I also find it intriguing the background picture follows you whenever you scroll on the page.

2 https://kahoot.it/#/ My classmates and I loved playing kahoot in high school and I realized that part of the reason we got so into it was because it was sensually attractive. And the specific sensual attractions translated into intellectual stimulation. It opens with a screen that changes color every few seconds. Every color of the rainbow and all vibrant. Color has been said to be intellectually stimulating on a whole different level than black and white and this is apparent in studies. There are studies that show how studying with multi-colored pens and highlighting rather than with a basic #2 pencil or a black pen helps students to better retain the information they write. It also plays exciting, pensive music throughout most of the quizzes and music, specifically instrumental, has been known for stimulating the mind strongly.

3 https://www.etsy.com/shop/CustomCatastrophes I love this website first of all because I also want to be a fashion designer and second of all, this style of fashion, that of a punk/grunge/colorful with stylistically placed black speaks to me. I love how vibrant, clear, and sharp the photos are. I love the name of the website, “Custom Catastrophes.” I thought that was pretty creative. In addition, is has a lot of alliteration which makes it flow well and makes it catchy.

4 http://www.daniellelaporte.com/# I love Danielle La Porte’s website, because it is just so inspiring/ motivational. What looks to be her signature at the top, I think, adds a visually interesting and personal touch to the page. It has a variety of content: there’s videos, there’s blog posts, there’s cute things to buy like journals and books.

My first collage is titled “Circles,” because I found that I had several circular objects this time around South Congress, as I was looking at the ground for the first time when I was scavenging for the physical items to add to my collages. I found that there is actually a lot of interesting things to see in Austin, even when looking down. There were several sewage covers with interesting designs on them. My second collage is titled “Life” because I wanted a piece that was not entirely comprised of stationary objects, but I wanted to do something more expressive, more, well, lively. That is why I include trees, leaves, humans, mannequins(which are lively to me, because they were pretty expressive, humanistic objects), etc. My last collage is simply titled, “blue/red” because I was experimenting with a theme of red and blue (especially lighter blue to bring out the intensity of the red).