Who am I and why am I here?

    For this assignment, we are to answer the questions "Who am I and why am I here?" To briefly summarize this post, who am I is the question that I should be asking rather than answering, but I do know why I'm here, to learn the skills and gain the experience needed to reach my ultimate goals. In this assignment, we were given partners in class and were told to draw their face. It may sound easy at the first, but there was an additional twist; we had to draw this person without looking down at the paper, only looking at the person across from us. We would then use the drawing and incorporate it into the assignment somehow. Down below is the picture of myself that my partner drew: 

    Yes, that is me. No, I do not look like that. Maybe, there are some resemblances between me and the picture. It was a fun exercise to do in class, and it was funny seeing everyone's reactions to their own drawings and the drawings of themselves. When we were told to use the picture in our next assignment, I immediately thought: I'll probably make a mask out of this. As the week went by, I thought to myself; *I wonder if other people are going to have the same idea and relate it to perception or fears or something like that.* I decided to scrap that original thought and tried to make some sense out of the picture. One detail about me is that I like to break things down, figuratively speaking, and find out how they work. In other words, I like to see things work but also figure out how they work as well. I applied this same concept while thinking of creative things to do with it. In the picture below, I drew the same lines that I saw on the picture onto another piece of paper, being very careful to make all the lines look about the same and trying to stay in proportion. I also made sure to have every part of the picture separated to further dissect it.   

    Now that all of the pieces of the picture were separated, I could see each part that made the picture as a whole individually. I feel like this can kind of describe a bit on who I am. I do like to be prepared for anything as much as I can, so going through the steps of taking the picture apart was a good plan for thinking creatively. I remember seeing or hearing something that said "Each stroke of a pencil/pen/brush can tell a different story." While I think that can be a very true statement, I'm not sure if the person who made that quote would say the same about a medium in which the person could not see what they were doing, but maybe they would. I'm not quite on that artistic level to know how emotion looks when it's drawn on a template and I don't have much experience with drawing either. 

    Getting back to the assignment, after I had everything dissected, I was ready to start thinking of ideas. Another detail about me is that when I see something that is taken apart, I like to see if I can put it back together. This is the idea that I decided on for the assignment. I would take the pieces of the picture that I separated and recombine them to remake a picture of where they would be placed if they were in the relatively correct positions. To do this, I brought the picture into photoshop and moved all the pieces to fit together. 

While making the picture, I could not help but have a lot of fun with it, it made me laugh a lot. Not to say that I was laughing in a bad way, but if an assignment can make me laugh, it's a good assignment. I'm not sure if this picture would say anything about me, but I can say that the effort that I put into reshaping this picture definitely does say a lot. When it comes to other people's work and making edits to it, I don't ever want to lose the same feel that the original work had, the Altered book being an exception. I like to take things apart but also to put broken things back together; I sometimes have a variation in this practice in which I still break something down to see how it works, but I put it together in a different way that I would enjoy better, which is kind of how this assignment worked out. I'm still not quite sure who I am, but assignments like this help me to further explore those uncharted boundaries, and I really enjoy that. I know one thing for certain, I'm headed towards very rough times. It's a part of me to want to be prepared, which is the main reason why I am here, to be prepared for the road ahead. If I can learn enough and be prepared enough to find a way to make my hard work become an enjoyable experience, I'd be able to die happy. I have not stated this much in the blogs and can't state it enough; I can't proceed without the good Lord in Heaven watching over me. I'd be hopelessly lost without God in my life, and I appreciate His presence more than I am capable of expressing in words, actions, or whatever other expressions are possible, but I'm going to try my best and keep praying that I'll make it through the test of time to His expectations.

This was one of the few assignments that I have ever really appreciated. There was only one assignment that I appreciated in high school and a few more after starting college, it's things like this that I want to have a relatively same experience with once I get into the working field. It's definitely something that I had to work on, but it's one of those things where it's enjoyable to a point where I don't consider it a burden.