About the overarching Unit Question:

The Reflections Project challenges Seniors to explore a question that is at once simple and deeply complex:

"Who am I?"

Experimenting with personal as well as lyrical essay forms, students develop insights about their experiences and identities before translating those ideas visually in various kinds of image productions, video essays, websites, mandalas, and short animations. Students deepen their technical communication skills by learning more skills with a variety of modern professional equipment and applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Substance Painter, Avid Pro Tools, Autodesk Maya, ZBrush, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, WordPress, and Google Apps.

About the specific project within the unit that is featured in this gallery:

To answer the question of “Who am I?”, Seniors were challenged to create “Personal Mandala”. Because mandalas appear complicated and so detailed, producing them can seem to a tedious and difficult endeavor. Students learned particular techniques in Illustrator with custom pressure sensitive brushes, automated transformations such as reflections, repetitions, and clipping masks, to flip the daunting task of creating an intricate mandala to be more fun, easier, relaxing, and an expression of personal style.

Black and white mandalas in this gallery were engraved and/or cut on our AEON 60W Mira 9 laser machine onto various materials such as plastic, acrylic, thin wood, thick wood, round bamboo, and even marble stone as chosen by each student. In this gallery, you will see the illustrated mandala juxtaposed with the same mandala on it laser engraved material.

Students also created a colored mandala, in some cases, a completely new mandala answering "Who am I?". In addition, students produced a video revealing the "building" of their mandala.

We hope you see some insight into each student’s personality with their "Personal Mandala".