Nadia Slawick- Project 4/5

Reflection

       This project was very interesting considering I had never worked digitally. I am rather familiar with Photoshop since I worked in photography. However, I had never manipulated an image in order to make it graphic and nonrepresentational. This project was quite a challenge for me considering all of the technical difficulties that I had encountered and my limited knowledge on Illustrator. However, I overcame those difficulties and my ending results turned out how I had envisioned. I did not just strictly use the shapes I had traced from the representational image and place them. I wanted to manipulate these shapes further. As a result, I messed with the swirl tool and others in order to morph the shapes I had created from my tracing. Equally important, I wanted to mess with leaving strictly the outline of the shapes, filling only a few shapes in, and overlapping the shapes. Overall, this project was extremely new and I had a great time experimenting with different techniques to manipulate the tracings and the original images as well.

Reflection

    Over the past couple weeks I had visited many places and I took this as an opportunity to document the places that I had traveled to. When we were first given this assignment, I had taken it as a great opportunity to explore downtown Detroit. I had climbed to the top of a few parking garages with my best friend and wanted to capture the city at night. Equally important, the city during the day when it was raining. Specifically during the rain because this gives the city a different feel and a different perspective. The day after, I went to my grandmothers house because she needed help digging up her flowers for the winter. I had realized that each flower had a different form of radial symmetry that depicted a series of sacred geometry. I have been highly interested in sacred geometry in the past and have always noticed it in specifically flowers. However, documenting these flowers for this project allowed me to appreciate it even more. Equally important, there are so many aspects of the principles of design that are present within these flowers, such as: color, line, shape, harmony, balance, contrast, and so much more. The weekend after my visit to my grandmothers house I had visited Kensington Metro park located in Milford. I always love coming here for photography because the nature here is always so incredible. I am highly influenced by nature for many of my pieces and thought that this was the perfect place to document the nature that surrounds me. Lastly, the following weekend I had traveled up north with my father and my uncle to help my uncle close his cabin for the winter. His cabin is located on a lake and is surrounded by a forest. On this trip, we not only closed the cabin, but we also went fishing on the lake and hiking through the woods. On this trip I had discovered so many things within nature with my father and my uncle and some of my photos depict these adventures. Not only did I create a reference archive that demonstrates the elements and principles of design, but each photograph tells an adventure and a story of what and who is most important to me.