Week 9 unfortunately I had left broad before class and went to the hospital because I was experiencing breathing problems. I ended up having a lung infection! Huge bummer. But my classmates who made projects about food presented their final research and pieces to the Food Studies class. I'm sure they all did amazing.

In class this week we had the pleasure of Speaking to the astrophysicist Santiago again, and learn more about the Universe! The class led by Santiago went to South Campus, where we first visited the meteorite gallery. It was amazing to be able to see and touch meteorites in person, and feel them and hear the metal clink noise some of them make. It was really amazing to think about honestly, that these things in front of me had lived so long, and traveled from somewhere far off in space. They are like fossils of different lives and centuries in our universe.

Hi Class,

This week Matthew and I have been working on finishing the writing for our story, we have the basic storyline but are working on the detailed writing, the number of pages, etc. We hope to focus on final edits and illustrations in this next week so week 9 can be more production focused! I've attached some sketches of what our art style will be like. We are going with a more minimal, mostly black-and-white, sketch-like illustration style. We've also decided the story protagonists are a child and a cowboy. 

Story themes:

- grief

Matthew and I spent a few hours during/after class on Thursday finalizing and developing the visual aesthetic of our book. We also created the main parts of the storyboard and decided on some pages and some of the writing. We are now filling in plot holes and finishing the story to begin full illustration and editing. We definitely want to speak with Santiago more before finalizing our story. Honestly, we were hoping to speak with him sooner and get more of his input before developing this far, but hopefully soon.  I'll attach images of our sketches and notes very soon!!

This week we presented our slides as our final project proposals to some class guests.

Link to google slides:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zfndYq6pLtVcaVgfxb9i_QkiIS6mWm2dcu0c1r6eTZg/edit?usp=sharing

In our first class meeting this week we met the Plasma scientist again but this time in our classroom. He spoke to us about magnets and magnetic fields. There were times I felt lost because he showed us many complicated scientific math equations. But I did learn more about magnetic fields. For example, the aurora. The sun ejects millions of electrons from its corona (upper atmosphere), creating solar wind. These particles slam into Earth's ozone layer and get trapped in the magnetosphere. The magnetic field around the earth (which we learned a lot about as well).

This week started off with the giant container of scoby, which really resembled what I imagine rotten skin to look like. It also smelled like what I imagine rotten skin would smell like. Personally, I really like Kombucha and I knew it has live bacteria and involves fermentation but I never researched or witnessed what the creation process is like. It was cool to see. The thing I really enjoyed learning more about in this class was sustainable materials made out of organic materials such as mushrooms.

I think the highlight of my week 2 in this class was seeing Alvaro speak about his research again! I love seeing and learning about his research on maize, especially as an artist/scientist who graduated from Berkeley & DMA coming from Mexico. I had the great opportunity of visiting his Maize exhibit in the sciences building last year.

In our first class meeting, we watched a video about bees, hexagons, pencils, and erasers. It was very interesting to see how hexagons occur in nature, what goes into the pencils I grew up writing with, and the erasers I used to scrub away my mistakes. For example, the native roots of the rubber used to make erasers. Then seeing the rubber in the eraser mill. I thought it was pretty sustainable how they add back in the defective erasers into the batch to create new ones.