Real Love or Sexual Appeal By Cliff Rangel (Extra Credit)

The purest & happiest thing we should feel
The wondering, thinking & hoping its real
Is it real love or sexual appeal.
We hurt , we fight, we bicker & steal,
The pride of our lover & cause them to shield,
Their heart from another
With shame & with guilt
we try to forgive & allow to rebuild,
But love is so blind so our eyes cannot tell,
We search but we lack the true meaning , we failed.
It is real love or sexual appeal?
The only way to tell is by what we feel.

By Cliff Rangel Jr.

Extra Credit Journal

The month of March was a tough time for someone I knew. He had lost one of his best friends at this time. They grew up together since they were little kids and he didn't know how to go on with his life. He was struggling to find the true meaning in life and was wondering why this had happened to one of his best friends. The thoughts kept replaying in his mind about what had happened and he didn't and couldn't believe it was real.
This is when other friends and family came into play. Although they were hurting as well, they came together to try and get his mind off of the situation that had happened. They came together to try and get his mind off of it by going and doing fun activities. That didn't help at all because all he could think about was his friend. His friends had no clue what to do to help him and all their options of doing fun activities and getting his mind off of it didn't help.
They finally all realized one way to help him out as well as themselves, as they were all still hurting. They all decided to tell stories about their friend who had past away and reminice on the good times they had together. Some that were happy, some sad, and some that were downright absurd. With the telling of these stories it brought joy to all of them because now they felt, although they couldn't move on, made them feel a little bit more comfortable to talk about their friend's life and the legacy he left on everyone in the community.
There were laughter and tears shed during the emotional time but it made him and all the other friends feel a whole lot better on the inside. He and others knew now why his best friend had to go, and even though they didn't want that to happen, they knew, and especially his best friend, knew it was in his friend's interest.

Creativity in it's Most Pure Sense

Well, we made it. The 5th blog post. I'd like to thank the loyal fans. S/O to you, Pat. I know I've had some fun with these posts but this one is gonna be real, because creativity isn't something to make fun of. It's how the entire concept of everything we do and know came to existence. I didn't ever think I was creative until I started writing and designing, so thanks to JQ for teaching me something I finally feel capable of doing on my own.

When I started with this project I had no intention of learning anything. The plan was to bullshit through it like I did everything else in my classes. Adderall and Vyvanse have propelled me to a solid 2.2 GPA after just one semester, and I hadn't planned on changing what I had started. But something weird happend. All of a sudden when I started writing, I became immersed. I just kinda, do it. Hours felt like minutes, just like that genius guy with too long of a name to pronounce. (chick-sen-me-high?)

Now, Don't get me wrong. I'm no Twain. If I was I might not even be here in Lawrence, writing a blog post that MAYBE 30 people will read before blogger takes down for not being read enough. And I'm find with that. Researching Al Spalding and how the game of baseball works has only made me better, and that's all that matters to me. Al taught me that things that seem boring can actually be fun if you put passion towards it. Baseball has always been a pastime for me, but it was Al who looked at me and said, "Scott, you do have talent. It'll take hard work, but yeah, you are ACTUALLY good at something." (He didn't actually say that. He's dead, geniuses.)

All and all, this has been byfar my favorite project in English. I've learned about myself and how creativity has helped me become who I am. Also, Al Spalding is an American hero. Thanks, America.

Reflection

           The fun thing about sketching, is that you can create whatever you want. It doesn’t have to be good, but something you think you would like to bring to life that lives somewhere in your mind. Looking throughout the blog, I noticed a lot of creativity from a lot of people. It’s amazing how talented people can be when you least expect it to appear.

The most difficult is that you have to have an imagination or some type of creative instinct, otherwise you will just sit there staring at your paper or sketch book drawing multiple lines and erasing everything until something comes up and then it could be days until you even get an image you want to create. I would try to be more creative with my work. It all seems simple and everyone has seen some type of version of the creative work. I would need a longer time to think of something creative and get drawn without it resembling some other persons work. This causes a problem because it doesn’t seem like my own creative work since I got my ideas off of many different sketches.

            The field I chose is quite important to me, since I have made it a hobby of mine, especially when I have nothing to do. It’s something that I have grown to like and just haven’t grown tired of it. I like to sketch as many things as I can and sometimes I have my bad days and others are good, just depends on how I feel and what I am doing that makes it so importance to me. My imitative work is different because I drew something that someone else did. When it comes to creative work there is a big difference in the outcome you get. I got my own mistakes and it came out the way I expected it too. Unlike the imitation, you get the same mistakes as the original creator and you also try too hard to make exactly like the original or even better. I did have to experience flow, otherwise I would just not care what I am drawing. I had to focus more since I really could think of anything to draw and once I got my idea, I didn’t want to lose it and not be able to finish.

Everyone in my class had incredible work and I can’t say that I admire one. I take the appreciation of all the work because I am not a critic and I don’t tend to be one. Creativity to me is escaping the world around you and working on something you love the most. Whether you are creative or not. Creativity is defined by what you think of it as an individual of creative work.

My Contribution to a Sketch Artist

Sloshball

So I said I was going to put together a Sloshball game (drunk baseball) today. I got it all set up, and then no one was able to go anymore, which sucks because I already bought my share of beer. To make up for it I've found a couple of killer GIFs (pronounced JIF, don't try and tell me different grammar nazi's) that fit perfectly with what it may have looked like. No this isn't Buzzfeed, and yes I am a loser for using JIFs. Anyways, I've played the game before, and I know for a fact that if we had played, this is what the 1st inning what would have looked like. Pre-gaming and no athletic talent whatsoever made us kinda look like the 2012 Huston Astros. This is the "feeling good" stage. Most normal human beings would stop here. But this is college, ya silly goose!

Pretty soon, I'll ballpark it around 4th inning, we're at the point where all of us are pretty hammered except Sober Sally who's taking this shit way too seriously. P.S. I could honestly watch that little guy on the right fall all day. Fucking classic. Like honestly what is he doing?

It's the bottom of the 9th, but you wouldn't know it because no one is playing the game anymore. Sober Sally still trying to hit the ball and the rest of us are just taking bat swings to the head. Welcome to blackout baseball.

Honestly I may sound like a giant jerk who all he does is drink and fuck around with his bros, but now that I've had a chance to think about it, thats what this game is. Just going and hanging with your friends who feel like family and some booze to lighten the day. Al Spalding, my creative person in question, was an All-American pitcher. He understood what brotherhood was like, and what it was supposed to be. That's why he created the rules of baseball. Some people just don't get it, but if you do, you understand that it's the greatest feeling in the world to be with your brothers. Sloshball would be nothing without Al Spalding, and for that I thank the legend himself.

I'm gonna throw this last one in here just because it's Saturday and it sums up the Baltimore Orioles coaching staff. Optimistic but unsuccessful. 

Reflecting on Creativity

Looking back on our class’ blog, it really amazes me how much I have learned from this unit. Just a month ago, I thought that creativity only really applies to a few areas like painting, poetry, and music. But after looking at my classmates’ posts and seeing their presentations, I have learned that creativity encompasses nearly everything we deal with on a daily basis.

I have learned from my own personal blog posts that creativity is not something that is only a select few can have. I have never considered myself to be creative and art has never been one of my strong suits. When I started my research on my creative field of abstract expressionism, I was dreading the third and fourth blog post. I was worried about how my paintings would turn out and that they would nothing like Jackson Pollock’s work or even an abstract expressionist work. Once I started and put the paint to canvas, I felt the creative juices start to flow. Csikszentmihalyi described this as flow. I experienced a slowing of time and just a complete focus on the task at hand.

The most difficult aspect of my creative work was figuring out how I wanted to approach my painting. Even though it may seem like abstract expressionism is just splatters of paint, there has to be a planned approach. The choice of colors, the placement of the splatters, and the usage of the colors all play a major part in to the quality of the finished product. Another difficult aspect of my creative work was trying to get my imitation and my creative work to be different from each other. I achieved this by diversifying my techniques. On my imitation work, I only used techniques used largely by Jackson Pollock. When I had to do my own creative work, I utilized other techniques by abstract expressionist artists as well as developing my own. These methods include applying the paint to the canvas straight from the tube and painting the green and yellow squares. A method that I developed was putting paint on to the brush and pulling back the bristles so that paint splatters lightly over the canvas. It was messy but it achieved the look that I was aiming for.

When it comes to my classmates’ works, I’d have to say I admire Leondre’s work. He put in a lot of time in producing the beat, writing the lyrics with his friend, and mixing it properly so it would sound as professional as it does.

Reflection

Looking back on creative processes that I went through while creating this blog, I feel that I have learned a great amount about not only my domain, but I have learned a lot more about creativity, and how different creativity can be to each person. Just reading some of the blog posts of some of my classmates, it is clear that each and every person thinks in different ways, and express their creativity with their own original twist on it. Some chose to express their creativity through art or photography, while others chose to express their creativity by writing poems, or diary entries. No matter what the domain was, you saw what made certain jump into their creative flow.

As for my own creative works, I feel I have made leaps and bounds in understanding the creative process, as well as becoming more creative. Looking at all of my creative works, I would have to say that one I enjoyed the most was the second blog post about researching a contributor within your creative domain. I researched Henry Ford, and his contribution to perfect the assembly line process, thus allowing for the mass production of his model-T cars, so they were affordable to all. I enjoyed this post so much because it was very interesting to see how Ford improved something in order to allow for his cars to be mass-produced. The assembly line has always intrigued me because the concept revolves around being efficient. A big contributing factor in me choosing what to research was fueled by efficiency. With everything I do in life, I try to be as efficient as possible doing it. Now sometimes that leads to me cutting corners, but for the most part, it helps in allowing me to quickly resolve problems I face and allows me to free up some extra time in my day. Personally, I feel that efficiency is a driving force in innovation of the modern era. Everyone needs to go from point A to point B faster than they did the day before, and they’ll need to do it faster tomorrow. Our society always needs something new and something better than what they had before. This inherent need for something better, is what drives people like Henry Ford to create something that can help achieve innovation. But, the best thing about innovation and efficiency is that there is always room to improve. No matter how good we may think that something is, there will be something that comes out that’s better.

Overall, I feel that this project was a very positive experience. I enjoyed researching and contributing to a creative domain that I found to be very interesting. One thing that I did struggle with was my writing style in a more informal setting, but that was something I quickly over came and used to improve myself as a writer.

Blog Post #5: Reflection

     The idea to use blogger and post creative works on the blog was an amazing way to share what was created and show the rest of the class what you put your effort into. The research, imitation, and creative work was successful in my opinion. I feel that I did a great job finding what I wanted to research and imitating what I researched.

     Hip-hop is an area where many people try to succeed, but only few make it to the top. The music industry is not about "what" you know, but about "who" you know. Some people in the industry are highly talented, but some people in the industry are low-quality and only made it because of who they surrounded themselves around. The reason that I replicated the Drake song for the third blog post was to show that there are people out here capable of doing what celebrities are doing. The fourth blog post was a prime example that there are people with the capabilities and talents living much lesser than artists that grew up with people around them. Keymani is an outstanding artist and has potential to be one of the best artist in his domain, but he's going to have to work hard because living in Kansas means that you have to get your name out so that people get familiar with you.

     The most fun part of my creative work was being able to replicate, present, and distribute not only my instrumental, but my friend's lyrics over my instrumental. The most difficult part of the creative work was figuring out what Drake song I wanted to replicate and making my replication sound as high-quality as his even though he recorded his song in a high-quality studio and I recorded my version on a laptop with the microphone on my headphones.

     If I ever got the chance to do this project again I would go to the real studio in the bottom of Budig where all of my friends that are local artists record for free. I would be much more prepared so that I could obtain much better grades on every post that I published. The field that I chose is important to me because I love music and I feel that music has been a big part of my life ever since I was a child. My imitative piece was me using someone else's music, but my original work dealt with me creating the instrumental and someone else recording over my creation. I admire every classmates posts because they were what they wanted to research and you can't say that any post was better than the other because they were all original.

Creativity = What you feel/think/have within you.

My Reflection

Over the past few weeks I have learned that there is more to creativity than just thinking “outside the box.” In this unit I have come to understand that there is a creative process, that creativity can be on a cultural or personal level, and that it takes hard work and dedication to come up with a creative idea. I originally thought that creativity was something that some people had and some people didn't. However I now know that anyone can be creative, you just have to immerse yourself in your domain and you need to be willing to work hard.

For my creative domain I chose to research the domain of blogging. I would say that the most fun part about researching blogging was learning about the origin of blogging and learning about the bloggers that have had an influence on the domain. I particularly took pleasure in researching specific bloggers because I was able to read some of their blogs and learn about their blogging styles. I also really enjoyed creating my own personal blog because it gave me the opportunity to do something that I want to do in the future. I liked finding something on the internet, researching it and then writing about it because conducting research is something that I find fun. However, it was difficult to decide what I was going to do my blog on because I wanted to do something that I found interesting, but also something that I thought other people would like as well. On that note I would probably choose a topic that was more interesting to blog about than snowy owls because that is something that not everyone enjoys.

One of the main reasons that I chose to research the domain of blogging is because I follow many blogs and in the future I hope to have a successful blog. As journalism major I think that blogs are a very important aspect of giving out information to the public, and therefore I would say this field is important to my future. I think that it was important for me to gain a better understanding of blogging because it will help in the future to know what blogs consist of and how they are constructed.

For my imitative work and my creative work I did two blogs that were very similar to each other, but with some very important differences.  Both of them were blogs that I created by conducting research on the internet.  However, in the first blog I only found a video on YouTube and gave my opinion on it. On my second blog I chose to blog about snowy owls, but for this assignment I decided make my blog credible, because credibility is a major issue in the domain of blogging. In order to make it more credible I had to do a lot of research to find credible sources, which was different from my imitative work because it didn't take much research to complete. During both of these blogs I found myself experiencing flow when I was doing research and when I was writing the blog. I realized that time sped up for me because it seemed like I had only been researching or writing for a short period of time, but I had really been working for hours.

Overall I thought that the best part of this unit was reading about and learning about my classmates creative domains. In particular I admired the artwork done by Andrew Pouppirt and the song made by Dre. I found both of their original works to be well original. It seemed liked they put a lot of hard work and thought into their projects and they were fun to learn about their creative process when it came to creating their masterpieces. 

Reflection

Reflection

            Like we all know I did my creative project over tattoo art, and more specifically I did a blog over a tattoo artist, which was a very creative person in all his work and was a very inspirational person in my opinion, and helped me while doing my project and made my creative part easy because he was so creative in his own tattoo art. That’s what I would like to talk more about is how this was fun and at the same time a little difficult.

            Well I would first like to start off with of course the good part and that’s how this was a fun project. The reason this was a fun project in my opinion is that I was able to pick my own creative domain and was able to research it and make it to what I wanted it to be, and what I mean by make it to what I wanted is because although this was a research project I was able to pick a person that I wanted an didn’t have to go off a list and I picked a very popular and creative tattoo that I have seen and decided to free hand and drawl a dragon koi fish. Another entity that I liked was that on the description you had questions that I could answer and give explanations on and what the questions where asking and for example on blog number three where I had to imitate an artist was a big help when you had the questions, and for me was a little hard to actually ask the artist that I was imitating just because he live across the 2,000 miles away and he is famous, but other than that it worked out in the long run because I was able to actually find some of the questions that I was asking on the internet and there was a great website where I found some great information on my artist Ami James.

            Now to the bad part that I didn’t like in this project well I didn’t have much to say on the bad part simply because it wasn’t all the bad or difficult, but one of the things that I thought was a little difficult for me was the part that I had to make my own tattoo, and that’s simply because I haven’t actually drawn like I use to when I was in high school. After awhile I shook the cobwebs off and made the art “ok” but like always when you practice you become better.

            The only thing I think I would’ve did differently was probably making my drawling better and putting more detail into it, but it’s kind of hard when I don’t have colored pencils and other materials to make it to my standards which like everyone else is hard on them selves to make sure things are great.

            The reason my chosen field was important to me is because I think that in drawling or in my case tattooing there is a lot of meaning and emotion that goes in to a tattoo or any type of art and that’s why it was important to me.

            One of the types of art that I liked was the crazy and at the same time cool and interesting was Andrew B. I thought that it was cool and it kind of ties into the tattoo type mentality because not every tattoo is sun shines and rainbows there is a lot of monsters and things that you look twice at if you see it, but I thought that is was a very interesting creative field and I also liked his drawling that he made.

            Creativity to me is thinking outside the box and making yourself stand out and be distinctive.    

Looking Back on Things

     I've learned a lot these past couple days while we have been learning about creativity. This unit has definitely broadened my horizons on what it means for a person to be creative. Having imitated someone who is very obviously beyond creative (if that is even possible), I can honestly say that the words "being creative" have an entirely new meaning to me after this unit. The most fun I had during our escapades into the creative domains was really being able to research more about Alex Pardee. He has always peaked my interest and I have always wanted to know just how he comes up with all the crazy stuff that he creates. I also had a lot of fun making my own creative contributions to surrealism art. It was really hard work to make those drawings, but once they were finished the sense of accomplishment was so great that it made me forget about all of the hardships and take in the fact that I made something unique. Having said this, the most difficult part was also intertwined within the best part. Coming up with the emotions to counter act each other in my drawings not only took a long time, but it was a very abstract process I feel like. Then, once I found that out, I had to come up with a situation in order to put these emotions in order for them to do the opposite of what you would think. It really forced me to think outside of the box and put my creativity to work. The domain that I chose is important to me because I learned about it really long ago from one of my best friends in high school and it always interested me but I never really had a chance to delve deeper into the work that Pardee did. My imitative work differs from my original work because It focuses on a different goal. Whereas my imitative work is there for shock value, my original piece has a much deeper emotional meaning. Creativity to me, as I said before, has been given an entirely new meaning to me. Creativity itself, to me, means being able to think abstractly and outside the box in order to create original ideas that make people think deeper than just what you have drawn before you. I am glad that I was able to take part in this research in order to better my understanding on what it truly means to be creative.

Blog Post 5 Creativity Reflection

This project was to expose us to different forms of creativity and expression.  Over the past couple weeks I have been exposed to different mediums of creativity my classmates chose to experiment with.  They range from assembly lines to poetry, photography and expressionist gestural paintings.  These projects of creativity have shown me how different students view the word “creativity” with the more literal projects like poetry or paintings to the more scientific process of figuring out the rate at which a product is produced by an group of people.  

Overall I enjoyed learning about Martin Parr and his photography style and message of highlighting objects or activities that people have put on a pedestal.  This work was hard to imitate since I needed to look at my own life and what I over use or take for granted.  Similar to how we looked at privilege I needed to look at what areas of my own life I did not think much about and came easy to me.  I feel that I was able to successfully do this by showing the food one consumes in a day and how we have glorified some things more than others with the use of bright colors or gimmicks.  When creating my own photographs I wanted to focus on what I found interesting to show the class and the viewer.  I wanted to focus on objects areas and things in my life I think are cool, some were staged some were candid but over all I feel that they are able to express the things I find interesting.  If I did this project again I might try and take more photos to have a wider range of images to pick from with a more brooder message.  My chosen field of creativity is important to me because as a selling photographer I need to be able to express myself creativity and be aware of different styles of photography that way I have a brooder understanding of my medium.  When I go out to shot images I typically have a general idea that I want to shot but am not sure how I want my images to turn out. Since I wanted to show objects I found interesting I would be able to take photos of things I found interesting and special often forgetting that I had a limited number of exposures.  The same thing happened with editing I knew how to edit my images to allow them to look their best without doing a lot of pointless photoshop work that would distract from the beauty of the image.  

When we had the class presentations I was really interested in Andrews Jackson Pollock inspired painting since I was able to clearly understand the inspiration and technique required to create artwork like that.  I thought it was look to see how he adapted a couple different styles of expressionist paintings to create his own unique work.  

Creativity to me is in expression.  It is being able to think outside the box to show a topic in a new light that might not have been viewed before.  We are all creative people we just need practice expressing our thoughts and emotions to reach a larger group of people.

Punk Reflection

I did my creativity project on punk music.  This has been the most enjoyable project of the year for me.  The most fun aspect of this project was also the most difficult for me, the making of my own song.  I wrote the lyrics to my song, Us, in July 2013.  The lyrics have were, and have always been, a difficulty for me when writing music.  I tend to write more depressing songs when I do write.  This was definitely one of those.  I reflect my lyrics on specific events that have happened to me.  When I wrote Us I was deeply depressed, hanging out with the wrong people, and doing things that I shouldn't have been doing.  It may not be noticeable upon the first glance, but a chapter of my life was put into that song.  It's a very difficult thing to do from an emotional standpoint.  There are points when I'm writing very dark songs that I want to throw the notepad, or whatever the lyrics are on, into a place where you'll never get them back.  In all honesty I burn them half of the time.  Writing your own music is a lot different than any cover I've ever done.  You're alone with yourself and your emotion.  You can express emotion from any song you play.  I have a lot of emotion towards the imitation of Good Riddance I did because it means a lot to me and it has a lot of memories.  When I wrote us it was everything that I actually did.  Not a memory of all the times I've heard it.  It's about something that actually happened to me.  They are two completely different emotional experiences.  One of the things that I really regret not being able to do was put a band together so I could really get a punk feel to this song.  I was really excited to be able to put in an electric guitar and some drums at the very least.  Doing an acoustic version was not ideal for this style.  I don't feel like it really fit the lyrics or the message that it speaks, but it was my only option left.  At the end of it all, music always has a certain flow to the listeners and makers.  Making my own music definitely creates an emotional flow for me.  This project was a new experience for me because it was the first time I successfully put music to any of my lyrics.  It's like a rollercoaster.  You think about the inspiration behind your work and look back on it and your past rushes up to you and fuels you.  It makes me feel free.  Lifts all my cares from my shoulders. 

After looking at the projects of my classmates I find that Cliff's is the most interesting to me personally.  Coming from a guy who wants to have a lot of tattoos, I don't find it surprising that I enjoyed his presentation.  Tattoos have always been a reason for people to look at others with disgust.  It seems that if you have a tattoo then society thinks that it means that you're some kind of dead beat or that you'll be on the streets begging for change sometime in the future.  I sit back with amazement now because in the last few years I've noticed that tattoos are becoming more acceptable in today's world.  That makes me completely overjoyed.  I've always been someone that is judged because of how I choose to look and this means that people like me are actually becoming more socially acceptable, and that people like me don't need to feel like the world is out to get them.  It really makes  me proud that people are finally realizing that just because you look a certain way or do certain things that are frowned upon, doesn't make you a bad person. 

Abstract Art Reflection

Reflecting back on this project I find myself actually looking outside of the box more, and being more creative when I think of things. I would have to say that the most fun part of this was just doing something I had never done before, and it was exciting to see what I could actually do with my creative mind. The most difficult was actually probably the same aspect. Painting was something that I had never done before, and I chose more of a landscape approach because you really cannot mess up nature, and that is what is so beautiful about it. The abstract concept was kind of hard to grasp as well, but once I read more into it I could see where the artists came from and their ideas as well. If I could do this differently I would possibly pick something maybe more challenging seeing as I know where I stand now and it would be fun to see how far I could push myself and how the outcome would turn out. I would maybe not pick something so new and modern, but more old school, that would have been interesting to do and see how I would have adapted to it. The field I chose was not necessarily important to me but I wanted to explore something new and exciting and something I had never really thought of as art even. The more I learned about it however the more I began to appreciate the art itself and I can now see it from different perspectives. My imitation was much different from my original work in the fact that my imitation was much more simple because it was on the more abstract side rather than normal art as my original. I would have to say that I did experience flow. I remember just losing myself in what I was doing and when I looked back up at the clock it was three hours later than when I had started. It was a different kind of experience flow that is. I had probably experienced it before but I had never known what the correct term was, and it is kind of a cool experience to feel as if minutes are merely seconds. Creativity to me is an expression of just who you are and how you find yourself. It is something that is different to everybody, but I believe that everybody can be creative and that there are no limits to what you can and cannot do.

Photography Reflection

I really enjoyed researching the domain of photography and the photographer Gordon Parks. I learned a lot from not only researching but also imitating the work of Gordon Parks and then exploring my own creativity within photography. I liked the Imitation section of the project. It gave me a chance to photograph from Gordon's eye. His style, once again, is to capture a natural shot, which basically means to photograph someone in their natural state, not posing; he also photographed in black and white, which I really liked.

What was most fun to me was imitating his work. I like to learn first hand what creative people see when they are in their prime and I was honestly curious on how exactly Parks did this. When I got the photo, I realized that taking photos of someone without them noticing takes patience and some sneakiness. It's important that they don't see you but you don't necessarily hide the camera, you just capture people in their moments.

What I found to be difficult is to accept my creative nature when it comes to taking pictures because me personally, I don't like to take pictures of myself or posing because I like to just take good pictures of people in their regular state. I also like to take pictures of cities and landscapes too in color so in a sense my style of photography is similar to Gordon Park's style of photography. So next time I know to not be so critical of my work and to just be accepting of my personal style of photography.

I chose photography because on-upon-a-time I was interested in photography which what made this project a little fun for me. Also, to be honest it was pretty easy to explore as well, but I guess that's were I experienced flow because it didn't feel like work and I actually enjoyed photography.

I admired everyone's work because no one in class really slacked on their research. Everyone obviously showed some type of curiosity or passion that they had. Whether it had been origami, music, painting, drawing, and etc. To me creativity is simply an interest that you took seriously and did something with it. Everyone in class took an interest and explored it and that seems to be the most important step into being creative.

Diary Reflection

After completing my research and imitation work on diary I found there is much more to it then just sitting down and writing thoughts down in a diary. Although that is a big part of it, you actually need to think things through that you want to write about and possibly how those things have impacted your life. I truly thought that writing a diary was going to be boring and that I was only doing it because I had to do it for this assignment. After finishing all the blogs and writing my own diary entries I found out that it is truly fun. When writing a diary you can write anything that you want to write about. It doesn’t have to be proper grammar it just has to come from the heart and what you are thinking about in that moment of time. While writing diaries I felt that some kind of weight had been lifted off my shoulders because some things I wrote about I couldn’t explain by talking about it and instead just by writing about it turned out better. There were no true hard parts to write about because I wrote about anything that popped into my head; happy or sad.
One thing that I might possibly do different if I ever write diary entries again would be to take some more time on reflection before I started writing ideas down. I want to truly reflect on things or problems that are going on in my life and can may be find a solution to them. Once I have figured those out then I would write them down in my diary and keep looking back to those problems daily, and see if I have made the change to fix them. The field of writing in a diary is important to me because it truly does make me feel better about myself. I can write down what is making me happy or sad at the time and how I can change those problems, or in the case of happiness what I can do to stay happy. Also I can write about what I am thankful for and it could end up being a prayer to God, which gives me alone time in my life to reflect and give thanks. My imitative piece is different from my own work because Anne Frank’s diary was not happy, but rather worrisome because it was during the Holocaust. My own diary was all about being happy and turning the bad times in my life into happy thoughts and reflections on how I can change the bad times.
I would say I definitely experienced flow while working on my diary entries. When I was writing it was like I was in my own little zone and no one could bother me. Whatever I wrote just kept flowing and I couldn’t keep my pencil off the paper. Time didn’t seem to matter to me and that was a blessing. I believe if someone experiences something to that kind of nature they should keep on doing it because it obviously makes them feel happy enough to lose track of time and care about the certain creative project they are working on. I would have to say my favorite creative work was Dre’s beats and song. It sounded like a song I would listen to on a daily basis and the fact that he created those beats just by messing around truly deserves a round of applause. I wish I was that interested to make beats and I give him all the credit.