Space+Art

Week 9: The Conclusion

I spent the weekend before this week finalizing a lot of scenery ideas for the book. The beginning forest scenery spoke out to me and was relatively easier to illustrate. The foliage has always been so comforting for me, and has held me through the most uncertain of times. I also loved the reflection scenes, particularly because of the symbolism the scene carries.

Week 8: Stars, Vernon, and more Stars

I’m not going to lie, I’ve had a very strange week 8. On Tuesday, our class met with Santiago again and visited the Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences Geology building. We stopped by a classroom that had a responsive, projection-mapped sandbox to denote different contour lines and elevations. We then continued down the hall and entered the exhibit portion of the building, where the department had many different kinds of rocks and meteorites.

Week 8: Meteorites, Planetarium, Space Dust, and Final Project Progress

This week was overall pretty fun and insightful! For our first class on Tuesday, our class went to the UCLA Meteorite Gallery in the Geology Building on the UCLA campus. Before going into the gallery, we stopped by a classroom where a Ph.D Geology student, Valeria, was preparing for a class about topography.

Week 8

On Tuesday, we headed to South Campus to visit the meteorite gallery and planetarium. On the way to the meteorite gallery, we ran into a fourth year PhD at the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences. She had been setting up an augmented reality sandbox that uses depth-sensing technology to label the topography of a landscape as the sand is pushed around the surface.

Week 3-2—Mushroom Leather & Plasma Production

During the first half of class, we explored how new research in mushrooms could change the world as we know it. Scientists turned artists, and artists turned scientists are helming the movement on sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products. While leather is a byproduct of the beef industry, plastic leather is produced to meet the unrealistic scale at which fashion suppliers manufacture their products. MycoWorks is a California-based company that has been developing a type of mushroom leather that needs very little post-processing.

(2/14-2/16) Week 6: Drafting Cont.

On Thursday, Alexia and I dedicated several hours to refining the story and aesthetic of our book. We  established the key elements of the storyboard and made decisions regarding some of the pages and written content. The story will follow a little boy and a cowboy as they venture into the wilderness and explore the complexities of the stars and grief. We are also in the process of resolving plot gaps and concluding the story to start illustration and editing.

(2/7-2/9) Week 5: The Boy, Hox Zodiac, and Stars

We started this week off with our guest speaker, Mariam Razi, who discussed her career as an artist, designer, and game maker. Mariam is part of the Hox Zodiac group, and she showed us her Illustrator file where she created the unique Hox typeface used in the majority of the project’s material. Additionally, Mariam also discussed the Feminist Climate Change movement and its  importance on viewing climate change from beyond the binary, and in Iran, beyond the border.

Week 4: Magnets, Ferrofluids, and Final Project Ideas

We began the week with a guest lecture from Dr. Walter Gekelman, who gave us an overview of plasma and magnetism. At some point, he brought in ferrofluids, a jet-black substance that is quite mesmerizing when it is drawn to a magnet. When the magnet gets close to the ferrofluids, it creates a liquid spike that reveals the magnetic field lines around the magnet. 

Week 7 Blog - Space spores

To better understand the importance of stardust, I had to learn more about the origin of it all. The Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. After the explosion, space cooled and particles began to form. These particles combined to create the first simple atoms, hydrogen, and helium. These ancient atoms set the stage for everything else to unfold. With the help of gravity's influence, everything slowly fell into place. 

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