History

History with Art

Before attending San Jose State University, I was a student at Mills High School in Millbrae, California. From sixth grade till sophomore year in high school, I was enrolled in an art class that taught pencil, watercolor, and acrylic. During high school, I was enrolled in a class called "Art and Multimedia". This class was the catalyst as to why I was interested in Digital Art. In my senior year, I took AP Computer Science. I fell in love with coding, but felt it was too technical for me. When looking for an art major, I stumbled onto Digital Media Arts and found that it was the perfect middle-ground for my interests.

High School Experience With Art

As mentioned earlier, I took the "Art and Multimedia" class at my high school. In this class, I learned how to use many of the Adobe Creative Cloud Softwares. We began with Photoshop, learning the different techniques using Google Images. After that, we dove a bit into Photograph and used rented DSLR's to take pictures. We took pictures of people and objects in different outdoor and indoor environments and in front of a green screen. After that, we learned how to edit them in Photoshop and/or Lightroom. For this reason, I know the basics of photography. We also learned a little bit of animation in Photoshop and video editing in After Effects.

Art at San Jose State University

The first class I took in my freshman year was Art-75: Introduction to Digital Video. It taught me a lot about the fundamentals of my major, but focused a bit more on Adobe After Effects. I wish I took Art-74: Introduction to Digital Media in my first semester instead of my second because both classes studied the same concepts. Digital Video, however, didn't give much wiggle room to experiment, something that I wanted to do because it was my freshman year. Another art class I took in my second semester of freshman year was Art-2: Artists in Culture. This class taught me more about myself than art, which in turn helped me become a better artist. I learned a lot about how artists can represent themselves in our society and the cultural background of different types of art.

I went into the Digital Media Arts major thinking that I would regret not going into Graphic Designing. I was very surprised to find out how much I love my major. The professors in the art department did an amazing job at keeping me focused and entertained with the number of things you can learn. Digital Media is a vast umbrella for many different art forms, perfect for me.

Key Skills

Physical Art

• Pencil/Color Pencil -- skillful in objects and skill art, weak with human figures

• Charcoal -- skillful in objects and skill art, weak with human figures

• Ink/Watercolor -- skillful in landscapes

• Acrylic -- skillful in landscapes

Adobe Creative Cloud Applications

• After Effects -- skillful in video editing, color correction

• Photoshop -- skillful in color-correcting, human appearance alterations, others

• Lightroom -- skillful in editing/batch editing

Coding

• Java -- good understanding of basics -- Github here

• Javascript -- solid fundamentals and basics

• HTML and CSS -- skillful in web design

Other

• Audacity -- skillful data bending

• MeshMixer -- beginner in 3D modeling