Author: Matt

As a kid, I loved legos. I always enjoyed the feeling of putting all the pieces together and gazing at the final sculpture I created. So for this sketch, labeled “assemblies,” I thought there would be nothing more appropriate or personal than drawling a lego man. While keeping the metaphor of a final portfolio and what comprises it in mind, I chose to make side by side drawings of the pieces of a lego man and a completed lego man. The former representing each aspect of the class, and the later being the collective whole.

I chose each leg to be one part of the Literacy Narrative because they are in many ways reflections of one another. In addition, legs are what carry the rest of the body, so without those initial assignments we wouldn’t be able to have progressed. The groin is Tracing Maus because it is the assignment that came between both parts of the Literacy Narrative and helped transition us from only writing to drawling. The torso is represented by our readings because it is the center of the body and is where everything else stems out from. The arms are Comparing Palestine & Pyongyang and Mapping Spinning because they are what we used to further build upon our skills. The hands are sketches and class time because they gave us the dexterity to fine tune our skills throughout the semester. Finally the head is our Final Portfolio because it is where our minds are directed at currently.

For this assignment, I wanted to determine whether the weather has any influence on my general mood. I therefore decided to record the highest daily temperature and my happiness from 0-100 each day. While recording the temperature wasn’t difficult due to its objective nature, determining my mood was totally subjective. However, I tried to keep this consistent so I recorded my mood at 9PM everyday in order to avoid timing bias. When creating the chart, I decided to represent the two sets of data as lines in order to see if there was any visual similarity between the two. Before I began I had thought that if the temperature went up my mood may as well, but this was not the case and the data had a very low correlation. I think the greatest flaw of my project was that temperature doesn’t accurately reflect the general weather outside.

If I were to do this in the future, I would not go about it in the same manner. I would likely try to find a way of quantifying how bright and sunny the day is in addition to temperature because rainy days occur and may have a different impact on my day then I previously realized. In addition, I don’t think the comparison is really fair to begin with. There are so many factors that contribute to happiness, and simply relying on weather won’t truly capture the whole image.

Overall this was an interesting project to take part in and even though it wasn’t particularly telling, taking the time aside to assess my mood was beneficial. Realizing the flaws helped me come to a better personal understanding of happiness and the various facets of my life that contribute to it.

The first thing that drew me to the image was the contrast between light and dark caused by the fire. As I started to draw my sketch, I realized how difficult it is to capture proper shadowing. Along with that came the realization of how light and darkness give apparent focus to different aspects of an image. My eye seemed more disposed to  light, so for me the most striking part was the fire. Afterwards I focused on the dark edges that border the smoke or the people who block out light. The way in which the smoke drifts out across the image creates a medium in between light and dark that is very compelling. The reason I think this image is considered art is for the intentional use of a poor filter in order to accentuate light, dark, and haze of smoke. The elements are natural but altered.

Before starting this project, I thought it wouldn’t be particularly difficult. However, I was immediately amazed at how long it took to even trace the individual pages of the book. For each page I must have traced for at least an hour and a half. I would definitely say that my tracing ability has improved as well as my recognition of proper tracing technique. In the first tracing, I often would smudge the graphite because of my hand. Consequently, I learned to draw left to right and carefully avoid contact with the paper as best as I could. After all of the tracings, the annotation proved to have its own problems. I initially though that I would just highlight certain aspects of the page, but after looking at a classmates annotation I realized I should cover the page in text. So, the annotations also took me around an hour and a half each. Next came writing about the different themes throughout Maus. I didn’t have any particular trouble with this part, but it was time consuming writing all of the ideas out. Finally came creating the landing page and posting the work. I found this to be the most gratifying part of the project because it felt like I truly finished as well as having something tangible online. Overall I would say this was a fun yet time consuming project.