Can you see it?

I chose this assignment because I felt I could be creative with it. I chose the first picture because during my childhood I had never been to the beach living in western Pennsylvania and my parents were more like the age of your grandparents so traveling wasn’t really in the picture. As an adult with children I was able to go on our own. Now I love the beach and the trips to the beach. The second picture was chosen because I love apples, pictures of apples, apple décor, and especially recipes with apples in them. I love a good salad with apples diced up in it. As you can see the pattern here I have chosen each photo with the point that it is a favorite of mine. I love the rain at night no matter where I am. Being in Pittsburgh in my childhood I went to a lot of games at the three rivers stadium and watched baseball and of course the Pirates are my favorite team. The beautiful azure sky you see while I am at the beach and another favorite sport of mine is going to the races. As a little girl my father raced, participated in the demolition derby and was a top mechanic in the pits. Of course I loved being a part of that and spending time with my dad. And the last but not the least important is my love for animals. I love pets and have always had several at one time. I have or have had each on pictured here and love them dearly. They are an important part of life and especially a child’s life.

Finally, here is my acrostic photo – can you guess my name?

I enjoyed this assignment very much my name is not always easy to adapt things to because of the repeated letters. I used power point and then saved my images as a photo so that I could upload it to Flickr. By adding text boxes I could label each one and the photo itself. This was a fairly easy assignment.

Would a rose by any other name smell so sweet?

My last 3 stars are going towards my Acrostic Poem.

I wanted to use three words that had meaning to me, but may not be understood by others right away. I chose the words Mermaid, Island, and Airplane.

The reason I chose the word Mermaid is because when I was little, that is one thing I wanted to be. I’ve lived by the ocean and the bay my entire life, and I have been swimming for as long as I can remember. I would stay in the water so long that my hands would get extremely pruny. My parents always told me that if I wasn’t careful, I would turn into a fish. I promptly told them that I wouldn’t turn into a fish, I would become a mermaid. That was my dream (which to a 5 year old is pretty realistic).

I chose Island because, well, I live on an Island and I am quite proud of where I’m from. Now I don’t have a typical Long Island ( or should I say Lawn Guyland) accent, but none of us on the east end do. East Hampton will forever be my home, no matter where I end up living in the future. I could not imagine living away from the beach though. Fredericksburg is even too far away from water…and I don’t count the river. That is not water I would like to swim in. But besides that, the island also relates back to the M and mermaids. If i hadn’t have grown up where I did, I probably wouldn’t have dreamt of being a mermaid.

Lastly, I picked Airplane for A. My dad has been flying for most of his life, so obviously I have spent a lot of time at the East Hampton Airport. To be honest, that is probably where I learned to walk. My dad was more of a stay at home dad, and I was well known at the airport. I even learned to ride a bike and drive a car there! (I still haven’t learned how to fly a plane, though.) The airport became like a second home to me, and right now they are fighting with our town to basically keep the doors open. People complain about the noise airplanes make, and that it is too close to their house….but I think that is stupid since they probably got a great deal on  their house since it was so close to an airport. But anyway, I am very pro airplane and pro airport, and I love everything that comes with flying (minus the turbulence).

This poem is important to me because it represents a part of me that some people wouldn’t see directly. It goes into my backstory and my history, and allows for people to maybe ask more questions about me and my life.

FINALLY HERE IS MY BEAUTIFUL ARTWORK

Now you’re probably asking how I made this lovely acrostic poem. Well, I actually made it on word. I took three blank polaroids, and pasted three images on top. I did all of my work in Word because GIMP and I don’t get along too well yet. I took the picture of the mermaid at the Norfolk Botanical Gardens. The Picture of Long Island (as the 51st state) I found on google and uploaded to flickr and the airplane picture I found directly on flickr. I downloaded the fonts previously from DaFont.com, and used them to add to the art. I didn’t play with any filters, though I considered putting it in black and white to go with the theme of Noir. However, I didn’t really like how it looked, and I preferred the color.

Thus this puts me at 11.5 stars and I am done for the week

For my first visual assignment of the week, I chose the visual acrostic, which requires using pictures that represent each letter of your name. I chose to use make this post through my noir character. One of the qualities of my character is that he is a visual artist, so I tried to incorporate different forms of his work’s inspiration into the acrostic poem to describe him further. Below, my character describes how each picture represents his own creative work:

D
Dali: The artist who defines the genre of surrealism is one of my greatest inspirations. The way he conveys meaning through his art is something I strive toward. Additionally, his work shows the ability to find beauty in the unconventional, which is a quality I try to imitate in my own art.

A
Animation: I have lately been working on incorporating animated visuals into my work. The dark and emotional characters that famed animator and director Tim Burton creates are a huge inspiration in this field. Here is an early sketch of one of the characters he eventually developed for a film.

M
Movement: One of the most fulfilling forms of creative expression for me is through movement. Dramatic and free movement has been a centerpiece in many of my performance pieces. The artist shown here, FKA Twigs, is a musician and dancer who powerfully conveys the emotion of her music through beautiful and creative dances. 

O
Orpheus and Eurydice: This sculpture by Auguste Rodin is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sculpture is not a large part of my work, but I appreciate the way Rodin conveys the emotion of the story in this sculpture. 

N
Noir: Noir is such an interesting form of visual. Lately, I have been attracted to new ways of using shadows and blended light in photography. It’s almost unexplainable, but I sometimes feel as though I am living my life in a noir filter.