Another Liszt Sonetto

I started a new Liszt piece, Sonetto del Petrarca 104, the most well-known one out of the Tre Sonetti del Petrarca. I learned No. 47 (the first one) last semester because it seems easier, and now I’m picking up the second one. This one seems a little bit more difficult, but Yunzhi said performing it is easier than it seems, so let’s hope that’s right :p.

To be honest, the first few times listening to this, I didn’t connect with it very well. It seems a little bit too irregular and dissonant for my taste (at first). But after a few times, I now realize it’s lyrical qualities and so I like it a lot.

This is perhaps the most dramatic sonnet of the three in the set. In this passionate yet agitated sonnet, the lover expresses his confusion love has put him in. He felt imprisoned, free, burned, emotional, contemplated, unrequited, passionate, all at the same time by his love. (I quoted this from my HTML / CSS training site).

Here’s Tiffany Poon’s version that I’ve been listening to and study off the keyboard.

Basic Training: Infographics

I’ve also been working on this training for making an infographic in Illustrator. The article that I need to make an infographic to represent is about saving the apples sources in Central Asia.

What I have so far

Basic Training: PSD Painting

I’ve been working on a lot of more technical projects so I felt like this is a good time to brush up on some of my drawing / design skills. Here are my works for this PSD Painting training. Abriella gave me some feedback on how to make them better so I’ll be getting to them soon.

This week, I’ve mostly been working on a UI/UX Figma training, in which I’ve created a personal portfolio with 5 pages in total that showcase my photography, print design, and graphic design skills. I started out with a sketch of my idea. Each design page would have a simple carousel for viewers to flip through my work, and the about and home pages would have a large photo of me with speech bubbles.

Then, I started working in figma to bring my idea to life. Creating a carousel on figma turned out to be much more difficult than expected; I had to create three separate frames for each page and place all three images in the order they would be flipping on each frame, hiding the images that would not be displayed. This is how it turned out:

Screen Recording 2021-01-28 at 11.26.51 AM

 

Maddy suggested I include placeholder text on the graphic and print design pages for an explanation of the process I used to create various artwork. Here are the graphic design page, home page, and about me page in order:

I’m still waiting on some feedback, but I think I’m close to being done! This training has taken me a considerable amount of time and at times has made my brain hurt. Using the prototype feature to add buttons and transitions into the website is useful, but the display of these “connections” is confusing. Here’s an image of all of the connections on my *5 page* site:

 

It’s madness innit…Overall worth it because my site usability is great, but figma doesn’t seem like it supports many more pages than this.

First Week

Hey! I’m Relena (she/her), a new STA starting this semester. A little bit about myself, I’m a sophomore, a Computer Science major, and I love coffee. I’ve just finished my first week of orientation, and it was really fun getting to meet the team and learn more about the program. Next week, I’ll start my basic training with Cascade, CLIO and more.

 

I’m looking forward to the rest of spring! ✨