OUR CREATIVE PROCESS
Inspiration
Throughout this process, we were inspired by our peers within Arts and outside of Arts. We got to learn about how other students were approaching their capstone projects and focus on the differences in order to hone in on the similarities. We learned that students do individual projects, work through internships, participate in service learning, and so much more in order to complete their capstones. Since there are so many unique programs, it was important to us to learn about them so that they creatively represented.
Professional Communication
We learned a lot about professional communication in the process of creating our capstone project. We were in constant communication with our program director, the other program directors, the Scholars Central Team, those in the Director's Office of Facilities Management, and the Scholars Advisory Board. We learned about being flexible, as we had to rethink our initial designs in order to come up with our final product. We learned how to ask effective questions in order to make the most progress as well.
TECHNIQUES
PAINTING
Painting was the main technique used in our capstone. On top of our teal background, we used black, silver, and white acrylic paints that we felt made each symbol cohesive.
DRAWING
A large part of our capstone was sketching out the designs. This was done by looking at reference photos and sketching them on a bigger scale, also known as the canvases.
REFINING
Throughout this project, it has been our main focus to not only come up with symbols that are representative of each program in College Park Scholars, but also to come up with symbols that would double as letters to spell out the word "Scholars". Refining our ideas has been a huge part of this project as we narrowed down our design options.
IMPLEMENTING COMMUNITY FEEDBACK
Because the main goal of our project has been to represent our College Park Scholars community, it has proven to be important to incorporate feedback from the community itself in order to accurately represent its members. Along with receiving email replies from faculty with feedback, we also incorporated the desires of students by giving a survey to the Scholars Advisory Board.
Color Choices
Both members of this group, Jenna and Jackie, are also members of the Peer Mentors program through College Park Scholars to help guide freshman scholars through their first year. Because the Peer Mentors Program has been such an important part of our time in Scholars, we wanted to incorporate a piece of it into our project by incorporating the teal color that is on the Peer Mentor shirts this school year as the background. To contrast this bright background, we went with the decision to use a grayscale (black, gray/silver, and white) for the symbols so they would stand out and be cohesive with one another.
OUR RESEARCH PROCESS
LITERATURE REVIEW
We thought of this project idea in a unique political/social climate that had arisen in the unprecedented year of 2020. Through the use of our sources, we have gained ideas that are crucial within the context of this project. With the country as divided as ever in this unusual time, we thought it would be beneficial to center our project around unity, and what better group of people to unite than the College Park Scholars at the University of Maryland? We thought of many different ways of trying to incorporate unity into our project, but ultimately landed on the idea of a mural as a visual representation of what unites us, as was demonstrated in several sources that we used. People paint murals for many different reasons, but according to Jane Golden, “without a mural, we wouldn’t be a community,” (Golden, 2002).
WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT RESEARCH METHODS
LITERATURE REVIEW
We learned a lot about the history of mural making and the importance of them. Memorializing certain events is just one reason why murals are important and we wanted to do the same with how we see the Scholars programs. Much of the literature we read in relation to this project had to do with not only the history of mural making, but also the history of the Scholars program so that we were able to accurately depict it through our designs.
INTERVIEWS
We were able to talk to a variety of different people in order to gain knowledge about murals and the Scholars programs. We learned about the collaboration between a Baltimore County high school and a local business to create something beautiful. We also learned about how to preserve Scholars legacy by using symbols. We were also able to have interviews and discussions with members of College Park Scholars faculty to gain their input and see our project from the perspective of others involved in the program that are not students.
ADAPTATIONS
A main technique we used during the drafting of our project was "Killing your Darlings." This means that as we went along, we adapted our designs to new feedback and made changes to the design of our project. One major example of this was changing the what previously served as a "C" in the word "Scholars" from the symbol of a magnifying glass to a crescent moon in response to feedback that this symbol didn't resemble a "C" as closely as we had originally thought.