To start, to be completely and wholeheartedly honest, I don't really have a goal for this course. I wasn't so sure what I wanted to do in College but just knew that I wanted to do something creative because the monotony of academics was starting to get to me so I filled my CAO with any creative courses I could find that interested me. Essentially I'm just here to be in College and to actually have fun doing something academic for the first time. My only other 'Non-creative' courses were either Psychology or Teaching(more specifically Spanish and Irish)
I've been liking the course so far though and have been genuinely happy about the skills I've learned so far like Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, etc. and have even found myself using them in my own time for personal projects and such. My biggest accomplishment last semester was probably finishing the year with a 3.75 GPA I think it was, especially getting all As in the second semester and my lowest grade overall being a B-. I've never been too bad academically but getting those grades in Year 1 in a sense 'validated' my choices for doing a creative course and my ability to do so.
I also didn't have a plan for this blog post, obviously, but I just got the idea to share some of my own personal work from over the past year.
Here are a couple photos I took and edited that I found on my laptop from the past year.
Burning Rose
Baggot Street
(I'm pretty sure I did this one before we had even started Lightroom classes)
I used Photoshop to mess around and colour old drawings I scanned in. I also used these drawings to figure out how to turn sketches into lineart on Illustrator. I did a couple of them but these are the only ones I really finished.
The next are a couple fun little photoshop projects I decided to mess around with, neither of these are serious and I spent no longer than an hour on either but they were fun and good practice nonetheless.
Little Tom Holland
Edited "The Great Wave off Kanagawa"
The next and last few pictures are short illustrator projects I took up every now and then throughout the year. They all served as good practice and the new skills I figured out really carried on between them, despite the practice most of them are still pretty 'DIY' and are very much not the most efficient way to do them but as long as they looked fine I didn't mind. I also did a few more projects for friends and family but those were more personal projects. (Most of these were made and exported for Mobile viewing so please excuse the image quality)
Zenitsu Agatsumu poster from the anime Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer)
Japanese Shinto Shrine inspired poster
The next three are from a series I started over quarantine based on the anime Haikyu!!
Tadashi Yamaguchi
Yū Nishinoya
Asahi Azumane
As for other hobbies I like, a lot of them are creative or I will randomly start creative projects when I feel like it. These range from general drawing and painting to embroidery, and often prop or model making. My most recent prop project was a Bokken(wooden sword) that I hand carved, got a pretty little scar on my thumb from the chisel too. I had never really considered Music one of my hobbies for the longest time but I've recently started accepting it as one. I've been playing the Ukulele casually since about 14 and I've recently picked up a Midi Keyboard that I 'borrowed' from my sister. I've dabbled in song writing every now and then, not to much success.
I've also recently gotten back into watching Anime after taking a couple year hiatus from it for no particular reason.
As for games I've been playing a lot in the past couple years, I played a lot of Fortnite with friends in 6th Year instead of studying for the Leaving Cert. I also picked up Tetris 99 in that time which is one of the hardest games I've ever played especially considering that I didn't know how to play Tetris before I started and had to figure it out. My sister also bought a PS4 a couple months ago which let me start The Witcher III which I've been working through gradually. As for more recently during quarantine I have sort of become addicted to Smite: Battleground of the Gods because all my other friends had been playing it for years and after getting a laptop for College I could finally play it with them to pass time and stay connected during quarantine.
I'd love to talk about things like favourite Shows or Movies but I can never remember any, let alone pick one for things like this. The same goes for music because my taste is so broad and quite frankly bizarre.
