Senior Projects

During the past two weeks I learned a lot about the basic responsibilities of being an adult in this society, especially the tedious but necessary tasks. I researched about car insurances, learned how to apply for and manage credit and debit cards, and even looked into house ownership and mortgage since my mother wants to buy a house in the United States. I think I am not alone on dreading those things about adulthood, but they are inevitable parts of life and I am glad to start early. I also made lots of calls and slowly learned to manage my phone anxiety.

My Incandescent teams had a meeting every day this week except Wednesday. Our executive board committee is planning a summer mentorship program for the elementary and middle school students, which is very exciting! I had some discussions with the founder of The Incandescent and my team, and we are so delighted for the opportunity to amplify diverse voices of the youth. The bad news is our founder and chief executive director Ariel has an emergency and won’t be available in the next two weeks, which made things a little chaotic. But Ariel chose us as directors/managers for a reason and I trust everyone on the board to operate things as usual while she is on a temporary leave.

We recorded a podcast episode about social media and (modern) loneliness. Check out our podcast on our blog and on Youtube! My friend Anjali did most of the editing and she is awesome.

Blog link: https://www.theincandescentreview.org/blog

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxZoGAxiaVs&feature=emb_title

I wrote a blog post about how this pandemic is affecting LGBTQ+ youth. I read another book. I did my first watercoloring in a while. We had some interesting discussions on the history blog. A lot has happened in my personal life this week, and I am grateful for all the healthy distractions.

This week, I finally got started on the pages for the comic. I spent most on the writing part, which came in the form of planning out and sketching my first ten or so pages. I think this might be my favorite part of the process. It’s just simple sketches that might not even look like anything. The purpose of this is to get a feel of how the comic will look and how it will flow from panel to panel.

There is a trend in web comics to not use panels, or to only use single uniform panels. This is mostly because of where people post web comics, and fitting it into the form of posting. I however, decided not to do this. I’m using panels like you typically would in a graphic novel. This is a choice I made for the delivery of my story. I find that style of panels to be more interesting to read and to write, and it gives you the ability to convey things in a way you wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

I got two pages done this week, though they were just the cover for the comic, and the cover for the Prologue. Here are those:

I supposed this is also me telling you what the title of my comic will be: Three Crowns. I might have mentioned before that this is a story I’ve had for a long time, so I already knew what the title would be.

Another thing I did to prepare for this was to read Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. It was incredibly helpful, and has made me much more aware of how I can use my art, panels, and colors to deliver the story better. I’d recommend it even if you aren’t very interested in comics, because it’s pretty fascinating the way he talks about how images and words have been used throughout human history. It is a bit of a hard read though, I had to reread some parts a few times to understand it fully.

Finally here’s some of the basic sketches I did for the first four pages. They might be a bit incomprehensible, but they’ll help me when I start to do the line-art.

Next week I’ll have at least one completed page to share, and I hope to get faster as I go!

Hi everyone! Sorry this is a little late!

I started the week up at Lake Ozark helping my uncle get the wood for the construction we’re doing on the dock. We’re thinking we will start construction on week six, but we aren’t sure yet since it will it depend on the weather. While we were up there we did a bunch of yard work, and I decided to review the boating course I took a while ago. It’s been so long since I’ve seen the material that I thought I should take a refresher course. My uncle is buying wave runners, so I thought I would review the laws and things to remember when driving a pwc before I get out on them. The boating course is one of the most thorough driving courses out there. It goes through things that everyone needs to know like laws on the water, but it has every other topic about boating as well, so technically I now know how to operate a sailboat if needed. It took me a very long time to complete. I was able to get out on the boat and drive it around for a while, which was so peaceful. This week I delivered Ellie’s birthday present to her (don’t worry we stood 6 feet apart.) I made her a scarf with a super fun ombre yarn. The rest of the week was more yard work and house organizing. My mom is getting custom made blinds for the house, so I had to do lots of measuring as well.

Last week and this week I was supposed to shadow Chelsey Freymuth, the Site Administrator and the Member Specialist, at Larry Hughes Basketball Academy. With her, I would’ve been doing: daily customer service phone calls, executing marketing plans and strategies, planning sporting events for the business, making sales to new members, learning techniques for those sales, and overall administrative duties for their sports company. Sadly, due to these circumstances, we couldn’t make this opportunity happen. I was the most excited for this site because I am close with Chelsey and I am a big supporter of the company’s mission. 

As some of you know, Coach Chelsey worked at Fulton as an Assistant Basketball Coach our sophomore year. During junior year’s basketball season, I sought to better my skills on the court; to do that, I had to put in time, energy, and sweat off the court. At the time, Larry Hughes Skills and Drills sessions happened at a variety of schools like CBC and SLUH because their new facility wasn’t built yet- that’s a lot of driving. I started going once a week; once a week turned into twice a week… and it paid off, other teams started to notice that I was becoming a “threat.” After the Fulton basketball season was over, I tried out for Larry Hughes’s U16 team and I ended up making their U17 team- a team for older, more experienced players- which surprised me because I had never been on a team where you had to try out like people at public schools do. Each day I walked into that gym, Coach Chelsey would run over to me with a huge grin breaking out on her face and encapsulate me in a hug. 

So, what have I been doing? I upcycled this year’s Basketball Team hoodie by cropping it, cutting off the elastic band below the hoodie pocket, and sewing the band to the bottom of the cropped hoodie for a clean, finished look. I applied to St. Louis Community College to take a free, online summer course in Spanish that would have transferred perfectly to Arizona State University, the college I will be attending next year- however, it would be cheaper for me to look at classes at St. Charles Community College. I still recommend you guys taking a look into it if you live in St. Louis County, it might be something to keep your mind sharp over the summer and give you a little taste of what college may be like (https://www.stlcc.edu/admissions/take-one-on-us.aspx).

Lastly, I just recently applied to Lion’s Choice and had my first ever job interview- it was very scary because I have never had to have a job interview because my previous employers already knew who I was. It was like a conversation and at the end of it, I was offered a position! As requested by my parents, I will not start work until COVID-19 has simmered down. So, this week I have another upcycling project where I will be turning American Eagle black skinny jeans- that I was going to donate but they’re not accepting donations at this time– into mom jeans by adding the adidas stripes from an old pair of leggings to the sides of the jeans… Wish me luck!

Hello!

Lately for language learning and math I have been using the app Anki. You can use it to write down words and their meanings on digital flashcards. It has been helpful to have an app that basically quizzes me over and over on the words I don’t know until I can get them down.

Thanks to the Señoras and grace, I am able to get twelve hours of back credit if I get a C or higher in the Spanish class on writing and communication!

I am writing a story about the metaphor of “finishing the race” from the the Bible’s teachings. It has been good to learn and think deeply about that.

I have also enjoyed researching more health questions that I have, looking up medical vocabulary that I don’t know, writing quite a few things involving the field.

Monday through Friday, I watched videos from a channel called Gross Cutting Room. (Yes I know the name can be interpreted as comedic but I assume the Gross actually refers to gross in the medical sense, meaning something you can see without a microscope, as the channel only focuses on that part) It features dissections of various single organs or parts of organs, some from the dead and some removed from the living. I had watched two of these videos for the third week of the project as well.

Each day, I would watch two of these videos. In order, I watched (listed as what they are titled as):

Lung Wedge Dissection (I forgot to finish the full thing from last week)

Kidney Dissection

Foot Amputation Dissection (the dissection of the amputated foot, not featuring the actual amputation)

Thyroid Dissection

Small Bowel Dissection

Gallbladder Dissection

Sigmoid Colon Dissection

Appendix Dissection

Esophagus Dissection

Hemorrhage Dissection

My favorite was probably the foot dissection, as I’ve never seen anything like it. There were so many problems with the foot: a huge ulcer, a lot of necrotic tissue, a huge abscess, hollow bones, and other problems.

As for note taking, I am in about to finish the whole notebook which should happen this week.

This week I felt inadequate as a leader. Sometimes I beat myself up and think everyone else on the team would be just as capable as the director, if not more. But my team members and friends assured me and reminded me of everything that I have done right, and they made me feel like my hard work is worthwhile.

We recruited three new members. We have eleven people on our team right now. I tried my best to show them everything we are doing and help them to adjust to the environment without overwhelming them.

There was miscommunication between teams and I learned some important lessons about how to articulate my thoughts and consider others’ feelings. This magazine is only able to exist because of the collaboration of every team. For example, if one of my team member misses a blog deadline, the art & website design team wouldn’t be able to complete the cover on time.

I wrote a blog post titled “How Humans Became ‘Domesticated’,” discussing social constructs. We also recorded another episode of our podcast discussing racism and COVID-19. I attended my writers group meeting via Zoom, and it gave me a sense of normalcy.

I really want to read more during the rest of my senior project. My friend enjoys Jeanine Cummins’ writing and lent all her books to me. I finished The Crooked Branch, and I plan to read The Outside Boy next week. Although her style is drastically different from mine, it nevertheless inspires me to write more.

I also worked on The Reader a little more. After talking to some of my teammates, I realized how different the process of publishing a literary magazine at other schools is, but I’m grateful for my unique experience.

Hello! Sorry I haven’t written an update yet! I keep forgetting or getting distracted.

All of my weeks have been canceled except for one which is the last week, but I am assuming it will be canceled soon. It’s very disappointing because I have been looking forward to this since first grade when I’ve watched the older kids present their projects but it’s okay because I have had a lot more free time and am cooking, cleaning, and learning more 🙂

I have been doing pretty much the same thing everyday for the past few weeks. I babysit Frank (my little brother) for the first half of the day (he naps most of the afternoon). I do this because both of my parents work full time jobs. Since they are both working from home Frank and I often leave the house and go for hikes or walks. In the afternoon I am working at Papa Murphy’s. During the school year I work 2-3 days a week, but now I am working 6 days a week. I’d prefer not to work this much but we only have three employees left (we normally have eight) and if we have to close the owners wouldn’t be able to re-open because of the financial situation.

Apart from this usual daily schedule, I run lots of errands for my mom in the mornings. I am dropping lots of things off at people’s houses or going grocery shopping. I am taking some of my money that I am earning at Papa Murphy’s and using it for donations to food banks around the St. Louis area since they have all seen a large decrease in donations since quarantine started.

This week of senior project, I continued watching videos and taking notes. I have about 30 pages front/back now.

On Monday, I watched an autopsy of an obese woman and it showed many problems that can occur when one is obese and also gave some statistics about obesity. What was most surprising to me was how the excess fat was distributed; the woman even had a diaphragm covered in fat which was very interesting to me.

On Tuesday/Wednesday, I watched an autopsy video that was double most of the rest of the videos I have been watching, hence why it took two days. The video went into a lot of new territory, such as the different methods of removing organs and some pros to some of them. The organs in this video were removed en masse, or all together (minus the intestines from the jejunum – the second of three sections of the small intestine – onward. This was a method I hadn’t seen before and it made a lot of sense as to why they did it that way (which I will explain later as it’s probably going to go in the fun facts section).

Thursday, I watched two videos, one which showed a dissection of the heart and part of the dissection of the lungs all by themselves, and one showing a brain dissection. I am watching videos on individual organs, as information on the individual organ dissections was minimal (the one on the thorough heart/lungs dissection alone was  just under 30 minutes alone, so it makes sense as to why the general autopsy videos do not go more into detail on the individual organ dissections other than brief clips, as the videos would be very long if they didn’t). 

Friday and a bit of Saturday/today I watched two more individual organ dissections: One of a colon that had been removed from a living person due to there being polyploid masses on it (which are potentially cancerous) and part of a lung removed from a live person due to certain cancer.

Next week, I want to continue to watch more dissections of different individual organs to fill in all the holes/as many as I can of what I’ve seen about autopsies.

I have already learned a ton so far and look forward to learning even more.

This week, I spent most of my time on preparation for my webcomic. If you didn’t see my last post, that’s what I’m planning to make my focus now for my project.

I’ll be using a story that I’ve been planning for a long time. I’ve tried to write it a few times in different forms and I’ve never gotten far, but this time I’m gonna really dedicate myself to it. As far as the story, I’ve spent a lot of time this week editing it and fixing plot holes. (I originally came up with the idea when I was in middle school, so there are a lot naturally). I will have to spend a lot of time fixing the plot as I go, but I find I work better when I just start writing, rather than planning it all out completely.

At the moment the general premise is that it’s a fantasy story about a prince whose kingdom gets taken over and he has to leave to get help. The story will follow him as he travels looking for help and his journey back home. There is obviously a whole lot more to the plot (including two or three other main characters who will have lots of spotlight on their own stories) but that’s the base for the story.

The other main part of making a comic is visual design. All of the characters have to have a purposeful design, which is a very different process than designing a character for a non-visual novel. I’ll attach some concept art and designs that I have for characters. I’m also going to have to do some setting designs. I’m taking a class on Blueprint on concept art that is really helping me with all of that.

In this next week I’m going to start actually putting the comic together, and I hope to have a couple pages to show you guys next week! I will also let you know where I’ll be posting the pages (other than on this blog: I’m not sure how much of the comic I’ll share on here).

The last thing to mention is that I’m not working on this alone. A couple of my friends are helping me out. I’ll be the one doing the actual writing and drawing of the comic, but they’ve created some of the characters and their designs, and have been central in shaping the plot. They’ll be helping me out as I bring our story to life. Finally, here’s some images of my work. (The paper sketches are works in progress using the techniques from the class I mentioned)