When given a vague prompt, how do you respond? When you’ve already been tested on your general skills, how do you show people that you’re different in a way that is still appealing to them? When absolutely everything is possible, what are your next steps?
Creating things, as an activity, is one of the only things in this life that allows you the opportunity to throw everything from before out the window and confront the possibilities on your own. When you’re okay with doing that, you’ll get all sorts of ideas. You can’t work on all of them though. Anything worth doing involves commitment.
In my third year of high school, I had the opportunity to take AP Art. That first day, it seemed like everyone was so much more talented than me and that I didn’t know anything. I decided not to worry about them and just to focus on my own projects. In the end, I didn’t feel like I was different, but I did make something that I still don’t think anyone else has.
The concentration of my portfolio - a portion of twelve images where the others covered the breadth of what I was able to do - was tea culture. I painted images of tea culture using tea. I had to do some research of what the culture was but I also had to experiment with methods to paint. The resulting images were imperfect but beautiful in their own way.
This project is finished, but I’d like to revisit it later on in life.
How might we make the lives of people better?
This is a human-centered UI/UX project all about plants. While there seems to be a trend away from nature in our lives, we can use technology to get closer to nature. The audience of this app design was individuals who lack prior knowledge in plant-care or wish to have a supplementary system to monitor their existing work.
This project is at least a little bit funny, but I intend it to briefly show my familiarity with design research, relevant programs in the Adobe Suite, and my appreciation for aesthetic presentation.
These images were the slides for the presentation of this project; it is also available for view on Behance.
How can my doodles bring utility to others?
I’m holding up a tiny little booklet called “little book of plants” here - it is a second version of my final project for a summer art class. The title of that final project is different from the one on this booklet, was somewhat strange, and requires some explanation. “NOT made by leine” it went. I used to sign a lot of my pieces as “not made by leine” for some reason - to remove myself from the equation when people knew it was by me, maybe it was. It meant something different here though. All creativity in this world is some sort of appropriation and to say that I’m original at all would be a lie. So, here, I combined that natural with the unnatural, the made with the unmade, creating a coloring book that other people will color and create in.
Where do we draw the line between what we’ve made on our own and other people’s contributions to us? Aren’t I really just a product of my environment? Aren’t all the ideas I’ve ever had simply mixes of the stimuli I’ve been exposed to?
I’d like to create more in my life, but my mindset has changed in recent years in that I don’t want to create for creations sake.
As for this project… I expect I’ll have a third version done somewhere near the beginning of 2019. This version had 20 pictures and I’d like to include many more. I’ll be selling these (because I’m a poor college student that has to work for tuition/food to begin with, and I have to justify my time on projects like these that take tens to hundreds of hours) so if you’re interested, check back then for a link!
How might we improve waste management by creating a product?