Malak Krayem (FMX 210)

  Boy, oh boy was this a lot of work. I chose to animate a scene from one of my short films. Since it was a fight scene and contained a lot of high speed action, I knew it would look super cool drawn out. I worked on this for about 8-10 hours for 4 days with a total of 253 frames. It took a lot of patience, but it was all really worth it!

  Initially with this project I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to have to figure out something crazy and weird to create and that's not usually my approach for projects. However, when I watched the tutorial, I heard Santi say something along the lines of making this project personal. And when I think of personal, I think of my culture. Sometimes I feel like I live a double life. The image I portray of myself in Saudi Arabia, back home, is different than how it is here in the States. I dress differently, talk differently, and maybe sometimes even act differently. This isn't to say that I change up my typical persona because I am ashamed of it or anything like that. But it is sort of a code switch. I change the way I carry myself to suit the situation and the people I am surrounded. It's just what feels appropriate to me. It's like speaking the native language of the people you are talking to as a sort of ease in communication. Back home, I absolut...

  I did not think creating this image would be as fun as it was. At the start, I was very intimidated by this project thinking it was going to be super difficult. I thought I would have to precisely outline every bit of the images, but when I watched the tutorial I was so relieved that photoshop was a lot smarter than I gave it credit. Some areas were more difficult to smoothen out than others. The biggest challenge for me was making sure that every character still had her shadow. That was a little complicated but after an hour or two of zooming in and fixing all the little details, I'm quite pleased with the result. To make this more interesting for myself, I created a bit of a narrative between the different versions of myself to allow them to interact with each other rather than every person doing their own thing. While some of them aren't involved in this scheme to disrupt someone's nap by drawing on their face, I think there is a nice balance of action going on. The in...

  This project was quite odd. I had a lot of fun with it as I felt like there were no restraints. At first I was a little hesitant about making myself look ridiculously bad, but as I got to my second version, I actually found it kinda funny. You can see the progression of the colors of my skin tone getting crazier as I began to let loose. I was pretty impressed with the preciseness of outlining my hair. I think this was a super valuable exercise for me to get the hang of the lasso tool on Photoshop! Original photo:

                When looking at all the projects from previous students, I noticed a lot of them had a strong message. I instantly decided I wanted mine to have one as well. The best way I could go about this was to make it personal -- make it something I could relate to. And so I decided to speak up on the conflict with Palestine. I thought, who better to shed light on such a devastating issue than an Arab?  I made several versions for a few reasons. First, I thought I was only going to focus on Palestine. So in the last version of my poster, you see the Palestinian flag at the bottom. But when I decided on the text I would overlay on top which says "when do we begin supporting each other?" I took into consideration the importance of all the countries involved in this problem.  The best part about directing this message to all Arab countries, both those who claim to be standing with Palestine and those who aren't, is that most of o...

  Lo and behold, my most tedious project yet. This project took me days and days to complete and perfect to a point of satisfaction. I realized I created a more difficult challenge for myself once I picked a picture where my head is tilted sideways. This would mean that the words wouldn't fall down in the same direction of my face. So when I first started, I considered changing my image after seeing this first trial: But then I realized it looked kinda cool, and I committed to it. And I'm so glad I did. I think the final product turned out better than I had anticipated. And honestly, I could see myself doing this again with a different image.  I was hoping to create this project in all Arabic at first, but I quickly learned that Illustrator does not properly support Arabic alphabet, which would have made this project near impossible to create as I had to type my words into a different program that reshaped my words in order for me to paste it into Illustrator so it could look ...