A piece I worked on with a personal meaning was the T-shirt project. I wanted to make a piece with a double meaning. Clearly, it was about saving Giant Pandas, but under all of that, I was making a reference to myself. There used to be a panda named Ling Ling in China, and I wanted to make an ironic joke that only my family would understand because put in that context, it means save me, not the pandas.

The project I feel was truly original was an abstract photo in which I took a picture of the ocean from the summer and faint images of majestic fish on it. I really enjoyed how it gave off such an eery atmosphere and it was almost like the fish were ghosts of the sea. I also liked how I was able to take pictures from my phone and turn them into something so spooky.

The project which most successfully evoked emotion was definitely my comic portrait of Amanda. The sharp shadows and gazing look portrayed a sense of mystery and dramatism in the piece.

The most challenging project for me this year was the constructed image of mice in the kitchen. I was often confused about how to place the mice into the background picture and how to delete the background from the mice. After looking up Adobe Photoshop tutorials on the concepts I was confused about, I was eventually able to do so, and it ended up being much easier than I had expected. Although it wasn't my best work, I'm glad I was able to learn the basics of Photoshop so that my future projects were more successful.

I definitely wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the constructed image of a swan without Ms. Sheppard’s help. At the time, I had no idea how to place images on top of eachother, change the saturation and hues of pictures, or even what a smart object was. Without her help, I would've been completely lost.

Olivia influenced my independent project of a married couple shielding themselves from flowers. I had saw she was doing this independent project in class one day and really wanted to make one, too. She helped me figure out how to make the picture of the flowers into a brush and how to do any steps I wasn’t sure about, like how to make the flowers black and white.

I think my most visually successful project was a project I did for the art show which was a kaleidoscope of a picture I took of New York City at night. I think it’s so visually satisfying because I was able to take such a simple picture and turn it into something that looked so complicated and abstract. I really like how it was symmetrical and the result of this project was turning a picture into an almost abstract design. I think it was really cool that I turned a picture of lights into a picture that resembled stars.

I think my most technically successful project was my final project, a comic portrait of my sister. I had smoother edges than my first comic portrait and added softer lines on the face, which I feel gives it a more natural look than my other projects. I used layers for different parts of the portrait such as skin, clothes and hair and overall, it looks alot more realistic than my first comic portrait which I’m very happy about.