When i first started here at AAST I thought it was going to be like coming into a school where everyone was new and everyone was wanting to make new friends but that ended up not being like that. My first few months were not all that great. I missed my friends at my base school and never had anyone to talk to but maybe 2 people i rarely saw at lunch or one i brought to school. That lasted all the way to the second semester. One the second semester started things got better, I got closer to the girls in my class and I started liking being here. Before I honestly wanted to go back to my base school even though I hate it there, I mean I wouldn’t have but I would have liked to go back. When I was at st. James I always had A’s and B’s but here I have made myself proud because I have steady had straight A’s and that makes me really happy. I feel like I have a way better future with school and everything being at this school. And even though I am not great at designing things and being artistic, I feel like in just this one school year I have really gotten way better than i have ever been with designing and drawing things. If i look back at the things I created at the beginning of the year compared to now and It makes me really happy to see it. I can’t really belie I have made the things I am looking at on some of them. And it was really cool to be able to enter something into those competitions and I always go to the state fair every year with my family and so to my own photography piece to get into that specific art show, that makes me feel really great about myself. I know that it really made my family proud and even though I didn’t get into some of the others i entered it still was great to try and know it was good enough to get into one.
I finished my bridge poster last week and it is not great but I am glad I got it done enough to get a grade for it and move on to my website so that I can get it done. Next week I am going to be in Disney for a full week but that also means I have to do extra work because our final is due the Monday I come back and the whole week I am gone is the week everyone has time to work on the final. My website seems to be turning out pretty nicely, and I am hoping I will be able to get it done by this Friday when it is due. I am pretty proud of my academic classes this semester and last semester. Right now i have all A’s and I am hoping to have all my grades stay that way but I am not sure they will after all my final tests and with the fact that I was out sick a few days last week and that I am missing a full week next week so close to the end. I am proud of myself for really trying and doing the best that i could this year though. I definitely need to start studying very soon so that when it comes time for all our exams in the next two weeks that I will be ready. I am glad we are starting to review now in some of my classes up until that day so that it will be truly stuck in my head. I have a chemistry exam which I am not sure if it will just be a project but I know I have a EOC for history, a final for this class, and definitely a final test for my English 3 class. My favorite hobbies at the moment consist of laying dow and reading, watching Netflix, going to the beach, being around my friends, and usually swimming but swim season does not start back up until August so I will just have to wait, which is something I can do.
I actually feel like I have accomplished and learned a decent bit over the last month. I did not understand the HTML thing we had to do at all but then I actually got it and I finished a good bit but I to down to the last two chapters and it got really hard so I moved on to the next things we were supposed to be doing. I used textedit the whole time I was working with the Lynda.com exercises and so when I started on my website I thought it was going to be super difficult but dreamweaver is a whole lot easier to use then textedit was ever. It does almost everything you need it to do for you and that helps a lot. I thought about what i was going to do for my Cooper River Bridge poster for over two days and could not come up with anything at all and I was starting to get a little upset about it and then I sort of thought of an idea but the hardest thing is I could not figure out how i wanted the bridge to look. I didn’t think the bridge would be hard to make but its actually been pretty hard for me to do and i’m not sure why. I finally had an idea and it came out decent but its not great, not good enough to win but I actually did try. Im just not great at making complicated things on illustrator. I need it to be super simple or it doesn’t look as good as it should. I am proud of what i have gotten done with my website. I have done all the pages and linked the pages to all the other pages and have done titles and the backgrounds for all pages and keeping them the same but I am just not sure I should put on the pages, like what needs to be written on the home page, and the about page. I want to add some cool symbols that people could click on so that they can be taken to another type of page that has to do with my website about photography and things like that. Usually every year we go on vacation for spring break but this year I worked so all I did was go on the beach most days, and work, and went to visit my grandma for two nights to bring my little brother home from visiting them for his whole sprig break but I still had a good time.
I am almost finished with my HTML, it has taken me awhile but I am glad to finally be getting it done. I actually think I have a good idea as to how to get my website started and how to do the website all together so that is good. I thought that I was never going to finish and was not going to have a good idea as to how to even get my website done but it does not seem like it is going to do be like that. I have two chapters left to do and then i will be okay. I have learned a lot on there and I really did not think i was going too. I know how to titles, add pictures, bold or make the lettering look pretty, how to bubble and make list on there. I have made a lot on illustrator this year or at least it feels like it has been a lot. I have my chocolate bar design, the hot sauce logo, this recent ocean bay poster we did and I am sure i have more but right now i can necessarily think of anymore and even if I do not then I can make some more to go on my website. I might make a few more anyways because since the beginning of the year I have gotten a little better at making things so I may want some better things to put on my website instead of the things I made before that may not look so good. Its funny because my favorite things to do with this class is photography but I actually hate photoshop and do most of my work in Illustrator but I do still have at least 3 pictures I have worked on in photoshop and I can make some more, I know i have one thing I played around with that has nothing to do with any photographs i have taken but i can still figure out somehow to make it work. I said I hate photoshop but I do not necessarily hate it but I just do better myself with anything i am working on when it is in illustrator.
I entered a picture i took of the back of my two friends facing the ocean, and hugging. It turned out to be a pretty picture and I was pretty happy to enter that one but it still did not get into Art Fields but that is okay. I ended up having to enter the same picture into the B&C Art Show as well because I did not have enough time to go out and think of another idea to do. I meant to but never got a chance but I mean I still really like the picture so hopefully the B & C Art Show will too. The first idea I had for the Earth Day at the Bay poster was I took one of the pictures I took with my friends at the beach and covered them up to where it was just the ocean and wanted to do something with the saying “reduce, reuse, and recycle” but I also needed ‘Earth Day at the Bay 2017″ added in there and I felt like it was not kid enough for an elementary school and was a little to many words so I just tried to create something on illustrator instead of a photograph. I made dunes on the beach and put turtles on each dune and had the sky blue and had “Earth Day at the Bay 2017” at the top and then had 3 boxes that were trashcans and each had white lettering that say “reduce, reuse, and recycle” on it. My idea was to show that if the trash were not picked up off the beach then the turtles and dunes and pretty ocean water could not be like that. I have not really thought all that much about the portfolio website because i’ve been busy learning all the HTML, and the starting on the exercises which have not been all that hard like I had in my head they were going to be. I have not really thought about a logo either but I have a logo that I used for my candy rapper final and it was just my initials with a pretty heart in the middle and I think I could just use something similar to that.
We worked on our service learning presentations last week some and this week too. We started on Tuesday and it took until Thursday to get through all of them. I didn’t do a lot of different things for my service learning but I did one thing that gave me enough hours for it, well more than enough but it was cool to see everything that people did and how much different things they did. People did really well on their presentation in general and I was happy with myself because usually when she says we need to create our own backgrounds I don’t because I never knew out to transport them over but i finally figured it out and did my own this time. I am entering the same picture that I entered into Art fields into the B&C Art Show because I actually really like the picture that I took. And also I hadn’t really had time to go out and do anything I liked better than it. We get our results of who got in today so thats exciting. I am happy because I finally figured out how to download the HTML thing in Textedit on my own so I can finally get started and rewatch the lynda.com to follow alone with it. I did start it yesterday after I got it downloaded but I think i did something wrong because it didn’t look right on the website page like the one in Lynda so I am going to redo it later today.Before I had just started to watch the lynda.com videos not realizing that we actually had to follow along with it so now thats why I am just going to start over and watch all the videos again. This week in class we did not do a whole lot other than work on the presentations and then do the presentations because that took up a majority of the class each class for almost all three days. But we did learn about the Earth Day at the Bay contest that I already have an idea for and we have had time to work on the HTML the rest of the time left each day and today.
I have done the HTML learning things where they teach you to do it and then I have watched almost all of the Lynda.com videos but I need to go back and re watch most of them so that I can go back and do all the exercises. I can’t exactly figure out how to download the files yet. But I am working on it when I finish the other stuff I have to in this class this week. For my service learning hours I house and dog watched for a weekend and then I helped get people to donate for our relay for life team here at AAST. I had a lot fun watching the dogs because I love dogs and being on my own for the weekend was pretty fun too. I think the thing I liked the least about my service learning was that I had to clean and do the laundry and stuff like that which was not all that fun but thats really it. There was not anything that I disliked about promoting the relay for life an getting donations because it was for a good cause and it was not all that hard anyways. I had 36 hours all together for the house sitting and dog watching and that’s something I liked because I only counted the days not the nights I stayed there but it worked out really great because I only needed 25 all together. The only brand new thing I did last week really was friday when I was not here which is why I am doing my blog today on Monday is that I went to tour USC with my parents and that was a lot of fun but then on the way back I also ended up getting to go eat with them at this place called the “Red Bowl” in Columbia. It was really good but I just liked that we got a chance to just spend some time with my family and I love that because we don not get to do it very often. I had never been to a Red Bowl either but it was a good experience.
My first impression of HTML was pretty good, I kind of got it and it was kind of entertaining to watch the way it went onto the page just from putting all those different codes and stuff like that. When I used code academy I didn’t like it as much as I liked HTML, I don’t know why but I just found it a lot easier to do, it seemed less complicated, but I just need to keep practicing code academy and i’m sure I will get the hang of it just like HTML. I would like to learn more about HTML, or use it more in this class, thats something I do like doing and it really interests me. For the Art Fields contest I am entering for photography, I have an idea of what I want to do but I don’t have the picture yet. I have the picture that I entered into the state fair art show but I would like to enter something different so my idea I that I want to go to this place near where I live, at the beach and theres the wall type thing that you can sit on facing the beach so I want to get like two of my friends sitting on it laughing or either turned around facing the beach and have them over to the side and also get the ocean and sand in the picture, I just have the picture in my head and I feel like it will look really good. If those pictures end up not turning out the way I expect them to then i’m going to use the same picture from the state fair or I could go and look through other photos I took when taking pictures for the state fair but the only thing with that is that its all of the beach and just the plain beach and I just wanted something somewhat different this time. I can’t really enter anything other than photography because i’m really not artistic so I don’t do well with designing and creating good things on illustrator so that’s not really an option for me.
I think my favorite of all the kinetic typography projects was Julia’s because I liked the way she had her words and the animation pictures too. I really liked the song . I also liked how Kayla did hers because of the wolf constantly moving and also the way she had the stars twinkling in the background throughout the whole song, I thought that was really neat. Honestly seeing everyone else’s made me feel horrible about mine because theirs was so out there and had so much going on and great songs and mine was so simple and no animation just words and also the song I picked was “happy birthday” because it was a song I though wouldn’t be hard since I barely knew how to use after effects in the first place but I know I need one for my portfolio next year so at some point i’m going to make a better one. I didn’t learn to much this week on my poster contest project because I didn’t start until later in the week because I thought i was going to have more time to go out and take pictures but it ended up being due friday so I had to go ahead and use something that I already had. What I originally had planned was to go this weekend and get some pictures of my nieces playing around together and laughing so I could use that to be to be like you can make a difference by loving everyone or something along the lines of that but I didn’t get a chance so I ended up using a picture of my little cousin that I already had and tried to blur the background out and just have him smiling where you could see “you can make a difference” and also added a quote at the bottom that says “in a gentle way, you can shake the world” that I really liked. I didn’t use any tutorials but I tried out different fonts to see which ones looked better on the poster and with the words I was using. I looked at most of the winning posters to get an idea of what would be good to use. My meaning behind my poster is that you can make a difference by raising your kids to be nice and kind people.
The kinetic type projects are done and i had felt really good about mine just because i had finally figured out how to do somethings in after effects but after seeing everyone go i don’t feel so good about it. mine is so simple and looks NOTHING like other peoples. I don’t necessarily want to redo it because i did what i knew how to do, i don’t know how to do all the different things they did. I’m happy i got it done because i needed a grade and even though it isn’t as pretty and great like others i still got it done and won’t get a zero for it. The only other thing is, is that everyone is showing theirs and i don’t want this to effect my grade but i can’t show mine to everyone because its so dull and not as good as anybody else’s and i would just rather Mrs. D see mine for herself. The you can make a difference project seems like it is going to be a fun project. I already have a few ideas, i want to take a picture and add words to the picture and i already have an idea for what i want my picture to look like but the thing is i have to take it outside of schools because i want kids to be involved and i don’t really want the background to be a school setting. I doubt my poster will be worthy of $1000 but i can definitely try because that would be great. I don’t want to something that has already been entered like anything similar but i love kids and i feel like a picture of little kids helping one another would be a great idea. people always aren’t as nice anymore but kids helping each other to make a difference would be a great idea i think. For the Artfields Jr. and B & C High School Art show i will probably enter a picture i’ve taken, i really like pictures of the beach and the ocean because i feel like that is a very artistic place to take pictures and a pretty scenery. So i will probably end up entering something of the beach.