Category: Student Posts

My Avatar consists of a beach landscape, along with two sports teams logos. I chose the beach because for the most part, I consider myself to be a pretty easing going and mellow person. Similar to the beach, a very relaxing and calming place, I believe that I have the same presence when around people. I think that I am a free spirited person that goes with the flow. I chose my background image to represent the type of person I am, while the two other images represent my interests. I am a huge sports fan, and my two favorite sports are by far Football and Hockey. Although I was born and still live in New York City, my dad is originally from New Orleans. As a result I am New Orleans Saints fan and New York Rangers fan.

At first I thought creating this image and completing this assignment would be challenging. However, although there were some struggles, for the most part I think I managed it pretty well. For my editing, I used “PicMonkey” which I highly recommend, becasue I think they make it really easy to use and crop images.

When creating my avatar, I was inspired by my affinity for being sick, which I infused into my version of the popular comic archetype the superhero, thus merging my identity with the courses content. 

Since I was a kid I’ve always been the kid who missed a lot of school colds and in recent years I’ve faced major setbacks because of whooping cough, pneumonia, and low blood pressure. Because of how these physical challenges have forced me to persevere and grow, I have come to see illness as part of my identity. By making my superhero’s power her illness, I like to think I’m viewing the negatives in my life in a positive light by focusing on how they have shaped me into a stronger person. I tried to capture this vision of empowerment by positioning the tissue box in the girl’s outstretched arm as if it is a trophy. When I inserted my name at the bottom of the girl’s feet, I found I echoed the same feeling of strength as it reminds me of the podium an olympic medalist stands on.

I included the grey clouds in the background to illustrate my ongoing struggle with depression, which isn’t always present in my life, but certainly looms in the back of my head, or here, in the image’s background. 

I found this project very challenging because I have limited experience with photoshop, so it took a long time for me to navigate around the program and learn to execute the desired actions properly. A specific difficulty I encountered was that after spending a few hours making my avatar image, I saved it to discover the resolution was too low, and I didn’t know why it had become so low or how to fix it. When designing my avatar, I was weary of focusing too much on negative qualities that defined me, so I hope my design has a good balance that represents all sides of me.

Image Sources:

https://flamingtext.com/Name-Logos/Isabel

http://clipart-library.com/women-superhero-cliparts.html

http://pluspng.com/png-tissue-4704.html

https://www.dreamstime.com/illustration/surgical-mask.html

http://www.sclance.com/clipart/grey-clouds-clipart/view-page-1.htm

My avatar is a painting I made this weekend. It is a depiction of a dream I had on Friday night. In my dream, it was 3 o’clock in the morning and the city was asleep. I quietly climbed up to the roof of my house with my beloved guitar and played my favorite song – Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton. I got so immersed in the music and joy and lost track of time until the last light from my neighbor’s window was shut. As I was about to leave, I heard a deafening noise coming out in the distance. I turned around in fear and surprisingly found tens of thousands of gigantic flowers sprouting up beyond the city’s skyline, rising straightly into the air. There were sunflowers, lilies, roses, daisies, and several other flowers that I’ve never seen before. They all had vibrant colors and weird shapes like those in Alice in Wonderland. I looked up at these incredible plants in wordless awe, thinking I must have found the gateway to my very own secret garden. Suddenly, the first sunlight touched my face and I squinted in the sudden bright light. When I opened my eyes again, all the flowers disappeared, leaving the clear sky and the silent city alone.

I chose this painting as my avatar because it reflects who I am in various ways. First of all, painting is my biggest interest, and clear structures and vibrant colors are two distinctive features of my work.

Also, you must have realized that I like playing guitar too (except that I don’t play guitar on a roof but safely indoor :)).

The city in the painting is my hometown Guangzhou, one major city in China. It is always loud and busy. Streets filled with people and cars. However, it is still a beautiful city, known as “the city of flowers” because of its mild weather. But this is not the only reason why I painted flowers in the back. As a girl born and raised in a big city, I’ve always longed for returning to nature and finding my inner peace there. Recently I read a book called The Moon and Sixpence. Here, the moon stands for the ambitious dreams we all have and sixpence is the modest income we need for survival. It got me thinking how many people would just keep searching for that sixpence on the ground but never look up to the moon until they finally miss it. Looking back to my painting, the flowers here can be interpreted as another form of the “moon”, or dreams so to speak. Therefore, this painting also expresses my wish that we can keep pursuing our dreams rather than letting a “sixpence” block our sight.

Designing this avatar is actually quite hard for me. To begin with, there are so many things about me and I have to select a few of them to represent myself. Then I struggled about how to put these elements together into a tiny badge, but luckily I found a way to. Besides, painting itself is time-consuming, but after all this process is very enjoyable to me.

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This past summer I was visiting the Moco museum in Amsterdam that featured Banksy. While talking to a fellow museum goer I found out about a piece that they did not have at the museum. After seeing photos of it I was intrigued. I had just been made aware of a piece of art that combined the work of the most talented director of our time and one of my favorite artists alive. 

After staying up for 4 years the artwork was tragically removed by the Ministry of Transportation. Following this event, a local graffiti artist painted the words “come back” on the wall in hopes that Banksy would return. 

In my avatar I chose to depict the bananas held by the hitmen and the cry for help sent out by the local graffiti artist. 

Kingslayer, Oathbreaker, a man without honor would usually be the words spoken behind the back of the knight, Ser Jaime Lannister, as he rode through the streets of King’s Landing with an apathetic vibe. Under the veil of sarcasm, condescendence, negligence, and cynicism lay a complex man with a crude sense of morality and justice that ignores oaths and personal honor. My Avatar features Jaime Lannister, who in my opinion is one of George R. R. Martin’s most complex creations. The reason for me choosing Jaime Lannister as my avatar would be the amount of character development he has gone through. Most characters from A Song of Ice and Fire book series and the tv show Game of Thrones would fall onto the extreme ends of the morality spectrum but Jaime is the only character that falls right in the middle of it. Interestingly, in his mind, Jaime believes his actions are justified and in the best interests of his family, yet when House Lannister’s actions are devoid of basic morality Jaime finds himself in a constant state of conflict and is forced to question his loyalty. 

That’s not to say that Jaime is without his faults. He’s crippled a boy, beat his cousin to death, and has forsaken several vows; but at the same time, he prevented the destruction of King’s landing, took over Riverrun without a single loss of life, and rode north to fight the army of the dead. Half the population of King’s Landing owes him a great debt when Jaime stabbed the “Mad King” in the back just before he gave the order of burning the whole city to the ground. Unfortunately, the knight would have to live with the label “Oathbreaker” for the rest of his life. I find the character Jaime to be the perfect embodiment of utilitarianism and nihilism and what it means to be human.

“The things I do for love…” ― Jaime Lannister (George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones).

“So many vows…they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.” ― Jaime Lannister (George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings).

Choosing and designing my avatar was a fairly simple process for me. I used the photo editing application PicMonkey to edit and crop the photo. I selected a specific theme, text, and borders. I chose a greyish theme for the background to bring out a gloomy effect with Jaime deliberately being situated directly into it, forced to navigate the rudimentary world of Game of Thrones with a vulnerable moral compass.

Image Source: http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/jaime-lannister/images/39669322/title/jaime-lannister-season-6-photo

Today I sat down with my Ticonderoga #2 pencil in hand and gave my first attempt at drawing my website’s banner picture, and despite my history of artistic ineptitude, I nailed it.

The problem, however, was that I made my magnum opus on a sheet of lined paper. I thought there was no way I was going to create a slam dunk of a stick figure on my first go, but lo and behold, I had, and now my handmade masterpiece was tragically unusable and forever marred by four horizontal blue lines.

33 imperfect circles and weirdly drawn eyes later, I finally recreated those exquisite strokes, and this time around, there were no Blue Meanies to be found. I guess lightning does strike twice.

The resemblance between artwork and artist is uncanny. I, too, have two eyes and a mouth, but more importantly, my portrait possesses the pencil and paper upon which I write. Yes, I may have forgotten the nose, but though my nostrils are absent, my essence is enshrined in this stick figure nonetheless. It’s nothing flashy with a dash of unnecessary exclamation, and that’s me in a nutshell.

This may look like simple stuff, but my ever-constant ability to draw one arm longer than the other was only the start of my troubles in crafting this graphite graphic. Painting apps were partially installed and scanners were both successfully and unsuccessfully used, but in the end I resorted to the questionable image quality of the iPhone camera. Cropping photos of pencil drawings won’t produce the highest of resolutions, but anything looked better than the PDF from that scanner: a gritty, grainy, no-good mistake. In hindsight, a pen would have probably scanned better, but it’s no matter, for through the magic of iPhone filters and clarity edits on the computer, I was able to make my alternative-means masterpiece somewhat presentable.

In a world of prodigy painters and top-notch artists, there’s no way I can use aesthetics to stand out among the myriad of blogs, so hopefully my lack of color or quality catches the attention of one or two someones scrolling through the internet. In the end though, this blog is for fun.

And so it begins…

My avatar is a blend of two photos I captured digitally with my name written in a bright golden color. Besides not knowing how many pixels my avatar was, my biggest struggle in creating my avatar was choosing its content. I first thought of my dog Ginger who I love and miss and then, I thought about my love for eggs. When I tried to combine my love for both it didn’t feel right. The next problem was finding pictures I was allowed to use. My current favorite artist is Leon Bridges, however my favorite album title of his is not for republishing. From this obstacle, I realized I the easiest place to find publishable photos is from my portfolio. I took two years of photography in high school, and though I tried to become an expert in film, digital was my specialty. My avatar is a combination of a photo I took in my garden from the beginning of my senior year and a self portrait I took towards the end of my summer year.

Each photo is special for a different reason, but both are connected to nature. The flower garden is a place where I go to sit and think. I can think for hours without interruption, my mind wandering from one topic to the next without hesitation. When I feel more anxious than normal I journal about what is on my mind. When journaling sometimes seems like too much work and the weather is nice, I go outside and stare at the flowers or the trees. The blowing of the wind and chirping of the birds take me to another world. A world with just me, my thoughts, and no expectations. The flower in this photo was my favorite because it captured the sharp light and soft shadows all while keeping its deep red color.

The image of myself was taken on a photo walk in the spring of my senior year. The assignment was to take a self portrait, but instead I wanted to take a walk around my neighborhood and see if any of the nature or architecture caught my eye. I had forgotten that I was assigned to take a self portrait when I saw the mirror in the driveway and thought it would be funny to take a picture of myself jumping. I couldn’t quite capture a jump, so I settled for a leg in the air. It was goofy at the time, but I am a silly person, so it worked well in capturing my personality in a picture. This image also relates to comics on a visual level because of the thick black ring surrounding the mirror. In typical comics, there are frames around each image so the reader can follow the sequence of the page. In my case, the mirror frame created an added layer to a larger photo, making it difficult to understand the photo as a whole without thinking about.

The blended images are brought together by my name written boldy across the top. The font allowed for the photos to be displayed and the color of the letters are meant to represent my last name: Golden. I love and identify strongly with both my first and last name and wanted to find a creative way to include Golden within Marlie, a.k.a write Marlie in a golden color.

Sources: App, Photo Blender

My avatar is a combination of a snippet taken from one of the pages of a comic book series called Archie (published by Archie Comics) and a self-made background containing my first name, Ore.The Archie comic book series were by far, my favorite books to read during my childhood and were the first thing to come to mind when I was pondering what to use as my central focus for the avatar.

The snippet which showcases three of the main characters of the series—Veronica(left), Archie(middle), and Betty(right), originally contained a different background which displayed several other characters in a classroom setting. Because of this, one difficulty I faced when creating this avatar was cropping out only those characters from the rest of the scene. Initially after realizing this difficulty, I opted to search for a different central focus instead; however, none of the other options that I came up with satisfied me leading to me circling back to my original idea.

The Archie book series were simply the perfect option as they relate to both the class as well as myself. The Archie series are a collection of comic books which is the same genre as many of the texts we will be reading in this class. Alongside that, the Archie series is also a big part of my own childhood. In Nigeria, where I lived for a good part of my childhood, these comics were extremely popular among the children from my school so I was naturally attracted to them as well. Additionally, I was also heavily invested in art back then so the idea of using art to tell an interesting story also intrigued me. I believe my avatar represents not only the theme of this class, but also several of my childhood experiences such as living in Nigeria, and my school as well as the development of my interest in art.

Images:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/bagogames/15612694675