MY CREATIVE PROCESS
Inspiration
My inspiration for my capstone came from personal experiences between my friends and I. Over quarantine, I found myself sitting for hours a day at my desk staring into a screen and my brain turning to mush from all the assignments. I kept telling myself that it would get better because everyone was going through a rough time. I had high hopes for the fall semester, however professors seemed to be as normal as ever with the workload we were given. I was excited to have something to do but as we all know nothing gold can stay. My roommates and I would be up all hours of the night: writing papers, completing labs, finishing homework, studying for exams. The list could go on forever. I got to the point that two of my roommates changed their majors because it became too much and one of them dropped their minor. The strangest part about that though, was the fact that we all saw it as normal; it was normal for us to work ourselves until we couldn’t anymore. It was then that I snapped out of the trance society put me in and realized this is not what life should be. With that, my capstone project was born.
Attention Management
Throughout the completion portion of my project, it was hard to stick to a distinct schedule because of my busy lifestyle. I had set aside lab hours in my week to work on the canvases but I would find myself filling that time with other assignments that were due that day and took precedence. Another issue I ran into was that when I did sit down during those lab hours, I would get artist’s block. All of my art up until now has been on my own terms, even in high school classes. This project felt so forced that when I sat down to work on it my creativity went right out the door. Because of these challenges, I developed a new method of keeping attention. Anytime I found myself going to log on to netflix or social media, I would stop and work on my project instead because I used to always do art in my free time. Instead of looking at it as a project, I saw it as a fun hobby that I’m continuing. This helped me tremendously because once I started motivating myself that way, it was easy to work for long periods of time because I was excited to do it.
TECHNIQUES
ABSTRACT DESIGN
In addition to completing my capstone, I also wanted to accomplish learning a new skill in the process. I chose to tackle the abstract medium because I had never tried it before and I didn't have much of an appreciation for it before I started. I thought it was a good way to capture the visuals I wanted to present to my audience. Consciousness is such a hard concept to grasp and an even harder one to visualize which is why I believed abstract art would be quite fitting.
COLLAGE
I wanted to incorporate some aspect of collaging into my canvases because often times I feel like my mind is a bunch of thoughts just pasted together. I felt that it was a good addition to the abstract realm of my work which was specifically reflecting the randomness of the human brain.
MINIMALISTIC LINES
Over quarantine I developed a liking for continuous line drawings and minimalistic design. I was going to have continuous lines play a bigger role in my capstone, but decided against it and just featured it in small spots on some canvases. I thought it highlighted the disorder of the pieces by obscuring outlines and purposefully being out of place.
COLOR PALETTE
There are specific reasons as to why I chose the colors for each canvas which will be discussed in each painting's section in the gallery. I chose the colors based on the survey results but also used artistic liberty in some places. The colors are directly tied to emotions or lack thereof. It was difficult to stay consistent with my results because there were times I visualized something different compared to the results. This being said, I did my best to stay true to the data and represent the students that spoke.
Research Technique
I learned a lot surprisingly from just research methods and how to choose the right one. I was originally going to do an interview process with ten students and give them each a canvas. However, after meeting with Heather, I decided to do a survey style questionnaire for a number of reasons. The most promising aspect of this method was it would be anonymous so students would be more likely to be honest, another aspect was I would be able to get a wider range of students because it is fast and easy to distribute. After I decided on a method I have to learn a little about psychology and figure out what kinds of questions I would need to ask to produce answers I could utilize. The survey questions are shown below.
Sparking Creativity
I previously mentioned how I was inspired for this project and also how I would motivate myself. One thing I could not control however, was when creativity would strike. I had an interesting method when it came to mustering up artistic muses; I had two ways of going about it because half of my project was positive and the other negative. For the positive canvases, I would wait until I spent time outside or had a really good day, basically whenever I was feeling calm, and that’s when I would work on the positive canvases. When I was in a bad mood or school was really stressing me out, I would feel like cursing the system, and that was the best time to work on the stress pieces. This way my canvases were directed by the survey results, but would still be expressing raw emotion from myself.