My Reflection

 For the kete, Celebrating Culture, I created two pieces of visual arts. Both of them were done digitally. Because our task was to create a visual image of our culture, I listed down some key things from each of my cultures. The cultures that I wanted to include were my Scottish and Filipino heritage as well as my Kiwi culture which I identify strongly with because I was born and grew up here so I consider NZ to be my home. Some ideas I came up with were including a filipiniana, a shetland pony, native flowers to each country and a Viking helmet. Later that night I photoshopped everything together so I could figure out what kind of layout worked best. Once I was happy with the layout, I started sketching everything before lining it. Working up the colour was a long process, but the overall result was worth it (I think). Although it took many hours of sitting in front of a laptop focusing on each section of the drawing, I had streams playing in the background so that was what made it bearable. It may be hard to tell, but the mountains in the background are Mt Aoraki/Cook. The texts are a snippet from the national anthems of each country (Scotland excluded because they don't have an official national anthem but the Flower of Scotland is the closest thing to one). Here is the first illustration that I did:

For the second drawing, I wanted to take something from each of my cultures and merge it together into one illustration. I decided to go with an animal-based drawing so I chose the national animals of New Zealand and Scotland and a native animal from the Philippines. New Zealand's national animal is a Kiwi, Scotland's is a unicorn and the native animal from the Philippines is a Philippine Eagle, also known as a Monkey-eating Eagle. Once again, I worked on this at home for a long period of time but I was able to finish it within about 24 hours. Drawing it one section at a time made it easier to complete because that way I was able to focus on one part of the drawing at a time. The quote was something I found online and thought it fitted nicely with the drawing. Here is the second illustration that I did: