Reflection Paper

Unlocking My Inner Artist

In one year, graphic design has taught me more about art and creativity than any other thing in my life.

While I was in graphic design I learned how to draw. Before the class, even the stick figure I drew was more likely to have a neck half as long as one of its arms than not. When I drew on a computer, it was always in Microsoft Power Point and only with basic shapes. I was also quite limited in my artistic creativity; I rarely ventured beyond simple, usually repeating and symmetric, geometric patterns, and even that was somewhat beyond my abilities. This limitation steadily diminished as the year progressed. Half way through the first semester I was able to clearly imagine what I wanted to draw even if I had never seen it before. I was also able to sketch the general picture I wanted, which, while no Mona Lisa, would make my previous attempts resemble randomly drawn marking in hopes of creating a recognizable image. In the one year of graphic design I have had I have learned how to draw more than all of my past attempts combined.

The class has also helped me build a major part of the foundation of the career I aspire to: design of video games. In the class I learned how colors and shapes can evoke feelings and how different combinations can create a picture someone would want to look at or create an image that hurts to look at. I also learned about what other people like from reading the comments on my works and the works of my classmates. The information that I gained this year, from both lectures and comments, will greatly increase my chances of success in a career that is geared toward the entertainment of people.

My year in graphic design has not only unlocked my ability to draw, it has removed the limits on my imagination and sparked my ever growing artistic appreciation and creativity. Before the class my imagination was limited only to what I had seen before, in the strictest sense. Even imagining something that I had seen before from an angle I had not viewed from or in a setting I had not seen it in was next to impossible. Even if I remembered every detail, my imagination was still limited to the memory. What the class really did for me was to unbox my imagination and release my creativity. Now I can conjure images, both 2-D and 3-D, at will. I can even animate the images and create stories with them.

My year in graphic design has done three things for me. First, it taught me how to draw. Second, it unlocked my creativity and imagination. Third, and the most important, the course, through greatly expanding my artistic ability, has vastly deepened and expanded my appreciation of the beauties in both art and real life.