As an artist, one of the most important and efficient ways I realized to improve my work is to learn from different comments from the audiences. It provides me various perspectives to review my work and allows me to consider the ideas and opinions I wouldn’t think about myself. Being in the Creative Arts Fellowship to work with a small group of people with their own specialties and disciplines has the same effect on my own practice. In the spring semester, I spent most of my time doing research and trying different techniques for my final project. I brought test works to the group meeting sometimes to get feedback from others. The group provided me useful feedbacks that told me which parts of my work are working and which are not to help me further develop the idea to achieve the effect I want. For example, I got a comment about the arrangement of the drawings I drew for the project and it made me aware of the different effects that brought by different orders of drawings.

On the other hand, being in a group with people from different disciplines but all working creatively makes me realize there are a number of distinctive approaches for everyone to be creative. Although we were not working collaboratively for one project, the idea of incorporating different techniques and knowledge from different areas into the working process is practical. For example, I was planning to create a work that the audiences could interact with it at their own pace and my professor introduced me to a computer code program that helps build the hyper-text website. It took me a while to learn the technique and try things out since I’ve never done a computer-based work before, but the result turned out effective. In this attempt, I found some interest in creating digital art. Therefore, I did a little research on some digital artists and their works and realized there are plenty of ways to work digitally and creatively. I also took a digital art class in the spring and learned some basics methods to work with a computer. Digital art has a lot of potentials, especially now at this particular time when we all rely on the internet to connect with the world. I am planning to learn some computer languages to further develop more digital artworks.