Author: Fidan

Mapping Spinning Reflection

For this assignment, I decided to map the book by counting the number of pages with yellow elements. In the book we see that the author used white and purple to illustrate everything; however, on some pages, there are either yellow elements or the whole page is yellow. The use of this color may be a sign of some important event in her life, good memories, or even just light in the room. When I was reading I thought that she used yellow to show only all of the happy moments. However, while I was going over all the pages again for this assignment I noticed that there may be various reasons for using yellow elements. Therefore, as it was mysterious, at least for me, how in some chapters there can be more than ten yellow pages, while in the other chapters there are only three, I decided to focus mainly on this fact. When I started counting all the yellow pages in the book I realized that I have no idea how to visually represent it. After visiting Infogram, I decided to choose this chart as it is the best way to illustrate my assignment.

SKETCH 11: ASSEMBLIES

IMG_5876

For this sketch assignment, I decided to simply show which steps we took to complete the class. For sketch assignments, I decided to show 11 bubbles that display 11 separate assignments, which are not related to each other but at the same time they are all in one harmony. For Literacy Narrative assignment I just showed a book as a reference to the whole topic. Comparing Palestine and Pyongyang is also simply illustrated by two books. Mapping Spinning is shown by the recreation of a map with dots that are connecting. And the Reflection letter is also just a simple drawing of a letter.

Every step seemed easy and challenging at the same time. They seemed challenging when we first heard about them but as we were working and discussing, it became clear and possible to do.

 

SKETCH 10: DATA VISUALIZATION FROM EVERYDAY LIFE

Screen Shot 2018-04-23 at 10.38.43 PM

Research question: How good I am in improving myself?

Results: Not good.

For this assignment I decided to track how many times I do the things that I promised myself to stop doing or, on the contrary, to do more often. For example, I know that I rarely get at least 9 hours of sleep per night and this was one aspect that I tried to improve. However, the tracking showed that in ten days I had only three days when I slept at least 9 hours. Another thing that I wanted to improve was to make it a tradition to read for myself, not only for my classes. I tried to read every day before going to sleep; however, as you can see, I had only four days of following this “tradition” due to being tired and sleepy at the end of almost every day. And finally, the last aspect that I wanted to improve is to facetime my family more often. I know that because of the big time difference it is almost impossible to talk to them every day but I feel that I call them via facetime only once a week, which is not good. I tried to call them at least every two days but I failed to do so due to various reasons. Therefore, nothing changed and I talked to them only twice during these ten days of tracking.

The two habits that I wanted to make myself stop doing were drinking more than five cups of tea per day and listening to music every day for at least an hour. The first habit, which is drinking too much tea, is extremely hard for me to stop because I am a huge tea fan. During these ten days, I had eight days of drinking 5+ cups tea, which is not good. The second thing which is listening to music is the most difficult to improve. I listen to music. Every day. A LOT. And sometimes it is very distracting. Therefore, I tried to limit myself to only 20 mins of music every day, however, I failed to do so.

This assignment was extremely helpful to see how bad I am in improving myself, which, as I think, will force me to actually start doing something to achieve my goals, that I failed to achieve during these ten days of tracking.

For this assignment I used Infogram. You can also access my graph here.

COMPARING PALESTINE AND PYONGYANG REFLECTION

Writing this essay was difficult to me due to the fact, that I did not know where to start and, therefore, I decided to write down all the ideas that I had and then connect them and see if I can link them to each other. I started listing similarities and differences between Palestine and Pyongyang and then I realized that I wrote down enough thoughts and ideas to start writing this essay.
The main idea of my essay is that although these two books are similar in many ways and they both use journalistic approach and effective use of vignettes, they are completely different.

SKETCH 9: RECREATE A MOVIE SCENE

 

When I was thinking about this assignment, I could not decide which movie scene to recreate. I talked to my roommate and we decided to choose this scene from the movie Twilight. We chose sweatshirt that was similar to the one in the original photo. We used the whiteboard as our background and the main object was this red apple. Overall, it was very funny to do it because we had to take more than ten photos and we were laughing after each of them as we could not get the right position oh either hands or the apple. Therefore, as it made us laugh and forget about other work to do for a few minutes, I enjoyed this assignment.

SKETCH 8: COMBOPHOTO

I could not decide what I want to use for this sketch assignment. However, when I decided to take a break and to open Facebook to see some new posts and relax a little bit, I saw a picture with this smile at the bottom. It reminded me of tomato because of its color and shape, so I thought it might be interesting to combine them and see what happens. I used PicsArt to create this photo. In my opinion, the result looks unusual, funny, and well balanced. Overall, I like the combination of these two images.

1522728122746

SKETCH 7: TELL A TRUE STORY

For this sketch assignment, I chose to simply tell the actual story of how I spent my spring break. Due to the fact, that I did not travel anywhere and I was one of the three people on our floor who stayed in the residence hall, I was just watching TV shows and movies and basically doing nothing useful. When it was the first day of the break I was extremely productive, which motivated me and inspired me. However, the next day’s 12 hours of sleep and realizing that I can do whatever I want to made me procrastinate with my homework.

page-0-2

LITERACY NARRATIVE COMIC FEEDBACK

When I read the feedback sheets and had a conversation with my group, I realized that my comic was too short and I need to make it a little longer, maybe add one more page. Another thing that I noticed was that I did not change the focus at all. Also, I thought that my Literacy narrative comic lacked details, however, my groupmates mentioned that it was well detailed. Additionally, they said that even though the comic is short, it is clear, almost complete, and with good details. Plus, they suggested making it colored. Overall, in my opinion, if I change angles and distance, add at least one page, and maybe add some colors it will be complete.page-0

Colin Combs sketch

As I spent time sketching for this assignment, I started noticing that it was much easier to sketch it than I thought before. The peacefulness and calmness that we can feel from looking at the picture are what made me pick this photo. At first, I thought that I will sketch everything that I see. However, as I was drawing I decided to sketch only what is in the focus, not blurry backgrounds due to the fact, that I wanted to make an even greater focus on simplicity of the moment and on the fact that if a person is asleep all she needs in this most unprotected moment is calmness.

FullSizeRender

Photo: by me

Tracing Maus Reflection

When I was thinking about the pages that I chose for this assignment, I could not find any similarities and did not know what to write about. Then I decided to trace the chosen pages and during the process to notice some features that these two pages have in common. While I was engaged in the process of tracing them, I started noticing some details that I’ve never paid attention to before. This assignment helped me to better understand how big the tragedies were for Vladek and how they left a deep scar on his heart for the rest of his days. The tracing process itself was very unusual but I think I did pretty well. However, it took much longer to trace it that I thought. I spent a few hours on this assignment without even noticing how time flew. Additionally, for me, it was much easier to present my ideas in chunks like this, instead of writing in a more traditional format. However, I do not feel that this assignment helped me to get in on this secret language.

Overall, I highly enjoyed tracing and annotating pages and then linking the ideas between them.

955773B2-2CA3-47D0-893A-FF0AED895397

Photo: scanned from Maus’ cover page

1 2