For second quarter, we focused on what we wanted to do. I wanted to paint which I did, but I just stopped. I didn't know what to draw. I had one point of focus but it didn't come clear to me anymore. So I decided to make a purse out of a shirt. I had a plain t-shirt lying around and I don't use it anymore so I decided to make something out of it because I didn't wanna throw it away. I started to think about I like. And I came up with cities. I'm a city girl. One of my favorite city is New York. So I cut out a part of a t-shirt and sewed it onto the purse. I also sewed some other things that I liked. As you can see, I created a peace sign hand, city life, and love. Overall, this project wasn't hard. It took a lot of time and cause a lot of pain.
“All
I asked was what’s up I don’t see why you have to get mad.”
“Please,
for all I know you said something else in that made up language of yours.”
As
he, one of my classmates from the 8th grade walked away from me to
join the swarm of kids that were outside playing at recess. As I
turned to my friends and all I received was laughter. At the when
that this happened I hadn’t been able to understand what he meant. As a
way to avoid having this happen again I refused to talk to my friends in
Spanish. To me what I had said was simple and easy to understand. For
some time after that I felt stupid that I hadn’t switched back to talking in
English as soon as I saw him walking towards me.
As I went through the routine of going to
class for the rest of the day, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that what
I had said to him was wrong. When I spoke to my mom at home that day,
I had accidently spoken in English. Knowing that she barely understood me, I
just decided to not talk at home. A few days later back at school, at
another recess, the same kid came up to me and made fun of me.He was saying sounds to act as if he
was speaking Spanish. At his parting words he once again
repeated what he had said just a few days ago, that my language was made up. This
time I decided to gain the courage to ask him what he meant.
“Oh look, she don’t know about her dumb
language.”
With
that he left with his newfound friends, my friends. Ironically
my next class was Spanish. I walked into the classroom only to see
that the only seat left was the ‘danger seat’. It was called that because sitting there
was a guarantee that you would be speaking in class. The boy
was sitting two seats behind me and was laughing loudly with my old friends. The
teacher went up to the front of the class to start her lesson.
“O.k., I need
someone to come to the front of the class to write and recite a sentence about
what you do in the summer. Who would like to come up?”
Everyone
had turned his or her head to the side and away from the teacher. I knew
that if she picked on me I would have to speak Spanish in front of him again. If the
language wasn’t real then what was the point of speaking it, but just my luck,
the teacher had picked me. In a desperate attempt to get out of
speaking I complained of a sore throat so I could only write the sentence. I did
and went back to my seat when I finished.As
I sat there looking at the desk in front of me I heard some people saying that
I thought I was better than them because I could write a sentence in Spanish. In the
following month I started speaking in Spanish again at home. It was
comforting knowing that somewhere, someone accepted the fact that I was
bilingual. I now knew that I would have to change how I talked at home
from how I talked in school to how I talked with my friends.
In
the words of James Baldwin, “To open you mouth…you have confessed you parents,
your youth…and, alas, your future.” He believes that speaking a certain way
can led people to figure out your parents, youth, and future and in a way he is
correct.If
I hadn’t changed the way I spoke with my classmates, they would have thought
that I was acting like a ‘know-it-all’ without even bothering to see if it was
true or not. In their eyes, I was a kid with Spanish speaking parents
and in the future at the school I would past every test in Spanish just because
I spoke it. From then on I only spoke English in school and when in
Spanish class I tried to make excuses or just try to not get called on.I was starting to fit in again.I was able to talk to my friends and gain new ones. I
thought that not being myself had given me a new perspective on the things
happening around me. Yet still, in the back of my mind a
small voice wouldn’t stop nagging me, telling me that I should be myself and
every time that happened I would just push the voice further and further into
the back of my mind.
After almost three months of this, I
found out the answer to the question that I had asked a few months back. I was
helping my mom on researching different languages.I don’t remember why but I do
remember what I found out. Through the research I found out that Spanish
originated from Latin. That was not the only one; there are
other languages, such as Italian, French, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan. I was
surprised to say the least. I had spoke Spanish for so long thinking
that it was its own language and to my amazement, I was okay with this not
being true. I think it was due to the fact that I was apart of
something bigger, something unique. It wasn’t just a few words that
originated from Latin like in the English language; it was the entire language.
After
that I started to speak in Spanish more freely in other places that weren’t my
home.I finally realized that it was
stupid of me to think that talking a certain way in front of people made me fit
in.
What made me fit in was the fact that I was being who I really am. Sure I
lost some of my newly made friends but I gain new ones as well. From
then on, I spoke how I wanted and even tried to teach other people how to speak
the language, my language.
In quarter two we had a choice of what we wanted to do. So I did a series of sketches. Then I did the beginning of a comic. I used youtube to get some how on my shading techniques. My sketches resemble some characters form the popular manga Naruto.
Throughout the second quarter I spent most of my time cutting out the
stencil for my project I have about two left. My plans are to spray
paint the poem onto the windows. The project is very time consuming and
difficult. Letters such as O,R,A and G's were the hardest letters to
cut out because in order to preserve the actual shape of the letter you
must cut out little rectangles that connected the rest of the paper and
the middle space of the letter and cut around it. I had many trails
trying to get the correct grove on how to cut neat and with accuracy.
There were 15 sheets each containing about 25 letters. By the 3 quarter
I expect to be finished this project. I am trying to now figure out a
way to preserve the paper just in case I mess up the first trail of
spray painting because like Mrs.Hull says" We se you up to fail." I
will reflect on what i need to do in order to improve my work and
hopefully create a project I am more proud of than now.
I decided to draw/paint a peacock for my art project, for the 2nd benchmark quarter. At first I was not sure what I wanted to do for my art project. I wanted to do something really colorful but simple at the same time. Less is more! I am into nature a lot like trees, animals, insects etc...
I wanted to create something no one really thought about so, a peacock came to mind. I always wanted to draw a peacock, they're really pretty and odd to me. The feathers of a peacock are beautiful, they green, the blue, the yellow just blends in together. You really don't know how pretty a peacock feathers are until they spread them out. Usually the male peacock do that when they're mating to try to attract females.
One day I was in the art room during a free period and I starting drawing a peacock just for fun and it actually turned out to be pretty decent. Even though it started out as something I was doing just to pass time, it came to be something really elegant and pretty. I take pride into my painting, I worked hard on drawing it the right way, tracing lines, and trying to stay inside the lines. I contributed to my painting in and out of the classroom.
In the second quarter I focused on using different types of materials to draw the same image. One evening I found myself watching a PBS special on Bob Ross. He was instructing viewers on the importance of different techniques and methods. His focus was too on nature and its natural beauty. His idea about landscape and finding beauty in the middle of disaster are what lead my final project this quarter.
I chose to draw a tornado in the middle of a grass field because tornadoes are some of the most destructive natural disasters. The rip up and destroy everything in their path. They leave every thing out of place, and yet they make a new landscape, one where beauty must be found in the midst of disaster.
This is the first drawing. It was done with oil pastel and in color.
This was the second drawing. It was done in black charcoal.
.
The final image was done as a pencil sketch.
In the first quarter we focused on recycling and the human impact on the environment. We collected bottle caps. The collection of the bottle caps was to help inspire the pieces created by the students during that quarter and to remove them from the environment.
My sketch is of a hand reaching back toward the earth. There is a small recycle symbol in the top right had corner. The hand is pure. It is white, but surrounding it are the negative energies that accompany pollution. The earth matches its environment. Polluted. As the hand reaches back to support the earth, the negative energies fade away.
During the second quarter I have been building a table with chess board spray painted on top. he reason I did this is because i really like building things and I really stretched the art in it by adding a black finish with the chess board.
I feel that when I have the freedom to what I want that i can produce really good work. Not being restricted is a better way to expand your artistic talent.Also when you have the freedom to do whatever you can show what you can do without being guided.
For our second quarter benchmark, we were told to create a
piece of art of our choice. My initial idea was to sculpt an iPod or phone out
of modeling clay but I had a change of heart later on in the project. I decided
to make a prop from a movie that was featured in Dimensions Film: Spy Kids 2.The prop I wanted to create was a futuristic glove that was used in the movie
as a “gadget”. The film doesn’t show a full layout of the glove itself, only
portions and pieces of it , so I had to use my imagination to create my own
version of the glove. I decided to keep some features of the glove from the
movie so it can maintain it’s originality, but I added a few designs of my own.
Created by DaVonte Martin:
Screen shot 2011-01-14 at 11.05.41 AM
The main material I needed to create the model was an actual glove. At first I wanted to use a normal pair of gloves and then cut the fingers from them to give a more edgy look. However the cotton material of normal gloves wouldn’t look as neat as I would like, so I decided to buy a pair of weight lifting gloves from a department store which were already pre cut. After buying the gloves, I went to gather the rest of my materials. The first aspect of the glove I noticed from the movie was the metal lining which is shown on the palm of the hand. In order to recreate this model, I wanted to use metal stretcher of an umbrella, which is the metal bars along the sides of the umbrella, to represent the metal lining. Before cutting the metal stretcher of the umbrella, I had to first make measurements for my fingers. The metal lining had to be the exact length of my finger. My measurements were as followed:
Pinky: 6 cm
Ring Finger: 7.5 cm
Middle Finger: 8 cm
Pointer Finger: 9.3 cm
Thumb: 5.5 cm
After making the measurements of my fingers, I had to cut the bar of the umbrella that contained the bendable spring. The bendable spring would enable me to bend my fingers at free will without the need to worry about stiffness in movements. Cutting the metal was the most difficult cutting I’d ever done.
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The tool I used to cut the metal was a wire cutter because I figured it would make accurate precisions. It did, but it took much strength and patience because at first the metal seemed unbreakable. But with a lot of twisting and turning I created 10 metal bars that were equal lengths to my fingers.After cutting the bars, I decided to hot glue the bars to the gloves because sewing them would only give the bars rooms to fall in random directions.
On the glove used in Spy Kids 2, there were circular pieces of material placed at the tip of the finger that allowed the user to move the metal lining by moving their fingers. In order to replicate this idea, I precisely cut ten 1 cm diameter circles out of cardboard. I used cardboard because it’s material is created in layers so it would be thick enough to look like an exact representation of the glove used in Spy Kids 2.After cutting the circles, I painted them an “off grey” color so they won’t over shadow the basic design.
While creating the glove, I was given a project in my digital video class to create a commercial advertising a product of our choice. I wanted to advertise my glove and using motion/visual effects replicate the use of the glove in Spy Kids 2. The commercial will be posted within a day because it’s currently being edited.The glove took two-three weeks to finish so once I completed it, I moved on to another project.
The next project I designed was the second project of my high school career where I used modeling clay to represent my art. For this specific project I wanted to sculpt a model of an Infiti FX. I wanted to create an Infiniti FX because it’s one of my favorite cars and the design is different from most current SUV models. Before sculpting my car, I had to allow my modeling clay to soften. This process had taken three-four days because the size of the modeling clay. I started softening the clay by filling a clothes bin with warm water, at least five gallons. After filling the bin up with water, I sat two 13’’ blocks of modeling clay into the water.
After four or five days the clay was soft enough for me to mold. I started by creating the basic shape of the Infiniti FX. After allowing the clay to harden a bit, I used a sewing pin to add small features to the car as in the roundness of the bumper, and curves to the door. The next week, I deciding to make the tires. I created the tires by rolling modeling clay into a ball in my palm. Once the clay was shaped in a sphere, I slowly flattened the sphere so it can resemble more of a tire. Once I had a basic shape, I used my finger to create the depth of the tire. Once I’d finished creating five tires using the same method, I used the wheel of an actual toy car to create the ridges of the tire wheel. With the left over clay from the wheels, I made two rear view mirrors. The rear view mirrors had to be proportional to the SUV, so I had to make at least several different models before sticking the final model to the SUV. After creating the wheels and mirror, I used two sewing pins to stick the wheels to the side of the SUV. I did this for two reasons: One, they were almost guaranteed to stay on the SUV without any problems and two, the pin allowed the wheels to turn as if they were real. After sticking the wheels and mirror on the SUV, it was time to paint. Since the modeling clay was still soft after leaving it in warm water for so long, I had to wait at least a week for the clay to harden completely. After the clay hardened, I painted it after school in my art studio.
The tittle of my art work is "The Imaginary Garden" because its a picture of my imaginary garden brought to life. When I was younger my mom bought be a Vara Braley lunch bag, and it had all these weird looking flowers. So when i would go to sleep I'd have these dream of me being stuck in this strange gardn. Were every flower was bigger that I, everything was colorful and bright. This imaginary garden of mines had soon become a relaxing place for me so when ever i would have to go to the doctors to get a needle or when I watched a scary movie and could sleep I'd just always think of this garden and i'd be ok. So when thinking of a art project I though to myself to make it come to life.
When first starting on this project I drew a smaller version on white paper of what i wanted my bigger version to resemble. When I finished my rough draft, I also consulted my teacher Marcie Hall on how my drawing could be better. She gave me a few tips adn then I was off to make the final draft. When first making my final picture I was intimdated. But then as I started drawing things started to come together.
The medium I chose to use when bringing color to my artwork was pastels, as well as color pencils. I didn't wasn't to use paint because I put in allot of small details. And I wanted them all to be captures. I felt as though paint would overshadow them.
For the past two quarters, I have been lobbying for a greener Philadelphia. It began with a seed being planted, if you'll pardon the pun-- the tree that had stood outside of my house since my childhood was cut down. Although it was already dead and slowly falling apart, it was the only tree on my entire block. I wanted to be able to go outside and see something organic. Was that too much to ask?
Apparently not, because soon after that tree was taken away, another was planted in its place. A live one, this time. I wanted more of these trees, so I decided to do something about it.
My lobbying research eventually lead me to Greenworks Philadelphia, a project lead by Mayor Michael Nutter calling for an exponential growth in urban trees over the next 5 years. I expanded my topic to include other green aspects of Philadelphia-- carbon footprints, natural energy supplements, etc.
I have created 4 blog posts total. Each of them serve to educate, explain, or notify the public as to the environmental situation in Philadelphia.
My final blog post is in the form of a flow chart. Through answering a few yes and no questions, it allows citizens of Philadelphia to figure out the way they can best help to green Philadelphia.
The earth, much like the human body, will only tolerate so much abuse before it gives in and dies. We will not be able to continue living here if we do not preform some much needed maintenance. Even though I am done lobbying, I hope to continue being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Steve Birkmires and Ryan Francis' Weebly page about Gangsta rap and the battle against censoring hip hop music Including Music Video's, Photos, Articles and Timelines
(The
cashier just gazed at me with a blank stare.)
I
tried to organize my thoughts before I was embarrassed even further. I felt my
cheeks turning red as if my face was burning up. Then, I thought to myself and
realized that maybe the residents of Pittsburgh pronounced or had different
words for certain products as compared to how residents of Philadelphia may
call them. I just arrived here no more than two days ago for just a simple
doctor’s appointment, and I’ve have already been faced with an obstacle
involving language. Despite the fact that I was thirteen, I still had trouble
grasping languages from around the world. With one more hopeful try, I asked
once more but with similar words in which I was trying to portray the first
time.
“May I have something to drink?”
“Oh yes, what would you like? We have ‘pop’ if that’s
okay.”
Without
causing more confusion, I just agreed with what the cashier said. She handed me
a bottle of Coca Cola soda bottle. Exactly what I was asking for from the
beginning.
“Is that all?” she asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
Walking
towards the car, I hilariously shared my experience with my parents. At first,
they giggled a little but then just stared at me wondering why things were so
different between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh even though they are located in
the same state. After explaining what just happened to me, they burst into obnoxious
laughter. They tempted to make an effort and describe how certain things
conflict with language, environment being one of them. For example, since I was
raised in the South Philadelphia region my accent is different then most because
I pronounce water by saying “wudder”. Their words of wisdom reminded me of an
essay I read in which my view on language was effected.
In
the essay How to Tame a Wild Tongue by
Gloria Anzaldía, the main character creates a language to suit her identity as
well as the environment she lives in. The girl is experiencing difficulty
deciding between speaking one language; therefore she develops a language that
correlates between her personality and her opinions. Although I only speak English,
sometimes I do the same exact thing depending on where I am. Also, my beliefs
on language are quite similar to the author when she states, “ A language,
which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the
realities and values are true to themselves.”
This shows that a language is spoken and used to
appeal one’s characteristics as well as to portray the aspect of a person’s
life. Identity clarifies the inner beauty of someone by many actions, language
being one of them. This is relevant to me because when I socialize with my
friends I usually say things that express how I feel and what I am all about.
On occasions, I speak to authority figures with proper vocabulary and a
respectful tone in order to show my appreciation, but it still shows who I am
despite the community I am involved with.
After
several experiences of being in the state of embarrassment on either the words
I used for something or how I pronounced something, I’ve came to realize that
there are always struggles you are bound to face throughout life but you have
to approach them differently. This means that everyone is unique in their own type
of way especially when relating to language, so you just have to keep your head
held high and overcome this obstacle without being self-conscientious about
yourself. I’ve gained a large amount of knowledge by experiencing faults with
my language, but now I have a clear understanding on how to connect with people
from different backgrounds.Acceptance is a main goal that you must be
able to accomplish in order to actively engage within a community because then
a positive attitude is being conveyed. Also, it allows people to use their
language in whichever form they feel comfortable with. Clearly, language
reflects upon strength, dignity, power, and beliefs because it either builds or
breaks you through your identity.
