Top Ten Portfolio

Top Ten Portfolio Jodi Plotkin

Thirty Day Project

The thirty day project taught me a lot about the creative process and person. What really got me thinking about the creative person was when I decided to draw something that reminded me of home. I chose to draw my family restaurant, now I am no artist so I started to draw and it looked nothing like a building. I got so frustrated that I called my friend who is an artist and she gave me tips on how to make my drawing not look like a three year old make it. She kept on talking about shading for the bushes and to start simple and add detail. It was incredible to hear the thought process that she had when drawing. We had never talked about it and it takes a lot more thinking to make and incredible art piece than I assumed.

Body Thinking

Body thinking is something I have always loved. Personally I use this while studying. I have made dances associated with what I am studying in a class, and I remembered everything. This video was really cool to watch to see that other people can learn using movement instead of just reading or being lectured. It also really did help me understand what the scientist was explaining. Body thinking is a great alternative to teaching and learning.

Observing

In class we were asked to observe our chairs. We had to observe them to then write a story about the chair. Observing the chair was important to be able to almost connect with the chair so an accurate story could be written. It was interesting thinking about everything the chair had or did not have, which then gets people thinking about what could be changed to make the chair better.

Empathy

After we were asked to observe our chairs we were asked to write a story in the point of view of the chair. This tested how empathetic we could be. I personally had to think of the sole reason of chairs and what they could and couldn't do to be able to write a story as a chair. This exercise was really cool, I had to push myself to be able to think like a chair. Empathy is something that is really important for the creative process and I found out it is a little harder than I thought before.

Abstracting

This exercise was to teach the idea of abstracting. We were told to draw an animal (the middle dolphin) and then try and draw with less and less times picking up the pencil (bottom left is one line). It was really difficult to try and make the dolphins using less lines to not look like fish, but that was the point of the exercise. It is to see how abstract art is made and how it works.

Design Thinking

The process that IDEO went through highlighted all of the creative process. I was very interested in how the team members went about recreating a shopping cart. They took something that is used every day and changed it completely. Also, they went from just talking about what a shopping cart is, to actually designing a new model. It was very informing on how companies like IDEO work.

Tessellation

Unfortunately I lost my tessellation, but this is the design I cut out to trace. This activity is teaching people how to form pattern. It is very difficult to align the design to make it look really well done. It is also really cool to see how cutting out some crazy design and tracing it over and over can make it look like something other than a design traced over and over again. Patterns are important and this activity teaches how to form them, and also a little on how to find the pattern.

Creative Journey

Drawing out our creative journey was a very difficult thing for me. It is hard to put something so vast into a drawing. Creativity to me comes easily some days and does not come to me at all other days. It is a very hard thing to decide when you are most creative and less creative in your life. Also there are specific opportunities in life that bring out the creative side, an example being my senior year of high school I got to choreograph a class piece for the show. That year I was more creative than my freshman year when I hurt my knee and had to stop dancing for a while. This activity was fun to try and fit that into a drawing

Tangrams

Tangrams were a lot more difficult than I had remembered them to be. They are just shapes that can be used to make animals or other objects. It was really fun being able to play around with all of the shapes and try and find how they fit together. It brought in the playing aspect of creativity. I had to mess around with every shape and every design before finding one that worked. It was really fun and I learned a lot about how much easier it was as a kid to figure out the designs because there wasn't a preconceive notion about the shapes.

Guest Speaker Number One

The first guest speaker was a dancer. She asked us to find a partner and for one of us to close our eyes and the other to lead them. This exercise taught us not only body thinking but also trust and teamwork. Working in a group is very important in creative situations and to be able to trust the people you are working with is even more important. Sometimes in groups people will have to allow other to do some of the work and some people have trouble with this, so allowing one to close their eyes and the other to follow is a better trust exercise than the trust fall.

Conclusion

Over all this class has taught me a lot about my own creative abilities and what they could end up reaching. I learned that everyone is creative in their own way and that is what makes working in groups so much more fun. I learned that there is a lot more that goes into designing and developing a product than most people assume. This class has been good for bringing out creativity that I did not know I had. It was a great experience.

Appreciate

Credits:

Created with images by hellethom - "cobra chair" • khawkins04 - "Industry West industrial home design chairs 42" • tpsdave - "dolphin swimming jumping" • Alexas_Fotos - "shopping cart shopping purchasing" • jam_232 - "Garry's red twister" • grego1402 - "Tangram nº3 : un autre chat #jeu tangram" • SaraRistic - "Ballet /a practice/"

Top Ten Portfolio Jodi Plotkin

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