Week Last? TED Talk Reflection! (Blog #6)

Hey everyone!!!

WE MADE IT!! We all made it through our TED Talks and everyone's was great.

Well, that might have been the most stressful thing I have ever done. I hate public speaking, with like... a BURNING passion, but I survived. And I'm glad I did. Earlier in the year, the presentations we did were not nearly as stressful, but only because of the presentation style. Group projects are easier for me since you're up there with your friends. And the brain project was carnival style, so you didn't have to present to that many people at a time. But for the TED Talk, not only was it completely individual in front of everyone, it was ON STAGE?! I got up on stage, feeling like I was going to throw up (also feelings stupid because I had my huge stupid boot on but it's fine), and Mr. McDaniels read my title slide wrong. MAJOR HEART ATTACK- I THOUGHT I SPELLING SOMETHING WRONG.

"Cursing in Common Core" *me dying inside and frantically checking behind me* 

So there I was, literally on the brink of death, when I started to talk. I looked around and I realized that it wasn't as bad as I thought. A big room, with a small amount of people, for some reason, is very comforting. And honestly, doing that talk was amazing because now I know that I can talk in front of people (I mean present... everyone know I can talk [a lot]). I presented on stage!! Alone!! To a lot (not really bot) of people!! I'm ready for the world (hah jokes)!! Anyway, this project has given me a lot of confidence because I realize I can do it.

The TED Talk was very clearly the hardest part of my project. And when I sat down to write my script, it probably took me 4 days to figure out a conclusion. The night before the presentation I skipped softball practice (sorry not sorry but I'm also crippled so) to rehearse ALL afternoon, as well as MOST of the night. My mom, the sweetest person ever, packed me chocolate for after my presentation as a stress reliever (woah brain project throwback!!). But, anyway, glad this project happened.

I really hope to pursue more calligraphy in the future. It's super fun and relaxing, as well as the only art form I am halfway decent at. I think it'll be really cool to be able to address invitations and such. My brother is graduating this year so maybe I can help with the invitations for that!

Enjoy these throwback pictures in honor of my brother graduating

Well guys, this is it. Good luck in the future with your projects, and good job on your TED Talk!!
Bye for...ever? ❤️

Week 4: VLOG! (Blog #5)

Hello everyone!!

What's up guys, I'm here to awkwardly stall you so you don't have to go watch my vlog because it's super awkward. It was a lot harder to make than I thought it was, especially because I had to listen to myself on repeat *shudder*

Just kidding!!  You'll probably (hopefully) like it.

I will put the scans of what I wrote in the vlog below the video. I apologize for the low quality, the camera I was working with was so old and my tripod kept falling over!!!!!

Calligraphy Vlog!! from Dana Kuo on Vimeo.

Here are my drawings in the video:

I hope you enjoyed my vlog, thanks for keeping up with me for so long!!

Bye for now

Expert Interview!

Hello everyone!
My grandafther is my expert interview. Ever since I was little, he's been trying to teach me Chinese. A few years ago he brought his calligraphy set to our house over Thanksgiving. He showed me how to use the brushes and ink (which you will learn about in the video!) and that's part of the reason my interest in calligraphy was started. In addition to sparking my interest in calligraphy, calligraphy and neat handwriting saved my grandfather's life! That's why I chose to interview my grandfather.

Before you watch I just want to warn you that my grandfather has a strong accent so he is a little hard to understand at some points. Also, I'm sorry for shouting into the camera, he is a little hard of hearing! Also I apologize for the length of the interview, it was about 35 minutes long, so I tried to condense it as much as I could.

Quick breakdown (and what to make sure to see):
beginning-about 8:40: telling his story (main part starts at 4:14)
9:20-10:20: examples of his calligraphy (watch this part, his writing is cool!!!)
10:20-end: talking about brushes and ink (you can skip through this part to any part you want, he just has three different sized brushes that he shows me. I would take a look at around 15:30 because there's an example of the medium brush in there and look at the large brush because its really cool!)


Expert Interview from Dana Kuo on Vimeo.

Just a few clarifications:
-my grandfather was drafted
-LVT: landing vehicle tracker

Main takeaways: calligraphy and handwriting is important, it can save your life!!!!!
Also, focusing on the project, I learned more about the different types of calligraphy. I have only used a calligraphy pen and marker. I experimented a little bit with a brush pen, but I haven't used an actual brush for this project. I thought it was very interesting that he uses a brush to write and also mixes his own ink using charcoal. I hope to try this method, but I probably won't be able to in the timeline of this project.

Bye for now!

P.S. Here's another example of my grandfather's calligraphy. Basically it says to be a good doctor and have good ethics (I can't remember the exact wording).

Week 3: "& posture" (Blog #4)

Hello people!!

Isn't my title clever? Ha. Ha. Ha.

This week I worked on quotes with just the cursive alphabet. I tried to do 'accents' on some of the words but it sort of just looks weird. I mean, I have no artistic talent so as expected. Oh well.

So here are a couple of designs I worked on:

YES THE OFFICE OK

Thanks Sam Korth for the bottom quote.

In my last post I talked about how posture affects you. There are two categories the effects fall into: physical and mental. The main things I want to focus on from each category are the skeletal/muscular issues that come with poor posture and the effects on your mood/general mental health. I am proposing that students learn cursive throughout their elementary school career, which is why I would like to focus on skeletal/muscular issues and mental health. At a young age, if students are taught good posture, they will avoid things like back pain and varicose veins when they are older. It will also combat the bad posture stemmed from looking down at your phone.
Ok, hold on. I should preface this with that fact that when you write in cursive you have to have very good posture. If you are slouched while you write in cursive, it makes it harder to write neatly. Good posture will allow you a steadier hand to write with, and make it easier to write proper lettering (certain order of strokes, upstrokes and downstrokes).
Poor posture can result in many bad things for your body, not just varicose veins and poor digestion. ion.
It can lead to a decrease in height, because stress on the vertebrae will compress the bones of the spine and result in a loss of height. Bad posture can also lead to difficulty in breathing because when you slouch you compress your ribs, making your rib cage smaller and giving your lungs less space to expand. Bad posture puts extra stress on your joints which causes a faster breakdown of cartilage and joint tissue, which in turn causes a smaller range of motion for the joint and pain. Extra pressure on the spine puts extra pressure on the nerves around the spine, as well as blood vessel constriction and nerve movement constrict
There was an article published in Health Psychology about how posture affects your mood. The author wrote in the abstract "Upright participants reported higher self-esteem, more arousal, better mood, and lower fear, compared to slumped participants. Linguistic analysis showed slumped participants used more negative emotion words, first-person singular pronouns, affective process words, sadness words, and fewer positive emotion words and total words during the speech. Upright participants had higher pulse pressure during and after the stressor."
It is important for younger students to have good posture because it will keep them healthy as they get older and will make them happier people in general. It is especially important to teach good posture at a young age because that is when children are most susceptible to learning and making habits.


All this research on posture is making me feel bad, as I lay here slouched on the couch... But my ankle is propped up so I have a sort of excuse...

Anyway, bye for now

Edit: not quite sure why the gif and first set of quotes looks like that, it doesn't look that way in the preview version of the post. My apologies.

Bonus Blog! Experiments

Hello people! Time for a little bonus blog.

Alright, so. Just a quick extra blog post. My mom actually ended up me a brush pen as a surprise, but I'm sticking with what I said earlier and not using it for the project. I also found some Chinese from when my grandfather was teaching me over winter break last year.

The Brush Pen:
Like I said earlier, I think I will just use the brush pen for fun. However, it looks really cool so I wanted to show you guys!!

I was just trying to get the feel of the thin upstroke and thick down stroke here so I did the alphabet and a few random words that came to mind. Shoutout to Emma Hubbs for the honeygrow.

I wrote this on a card for my friend's Court of Honor, just wanted to share because I like the exclamation point

Chinese:

Again, like I said earlier, I found a sheet in my room from when my grandfather was teaching me some basic Chinese two years ago.

My rendition of the characters is pretty awful, I apologize. It's pretty difficult since I have practically 0 experience and I wasn't able to watch someone do it perform I imitated it. 

Yes, my characters are absolutely horrific but ya know. And yes, that does say egg and cake. Fun fact: I know how to call someone a big dumb egg. Thumbs up for Chinese insults.

In all seriousness though, my dad calls his dad "ba" and I call my grandfather (this is the modified for a English-speaking child version) "gong-gong" which means father's father. I also call my grandmother (also modified) "po-po" (but doesn't sound like po-po as in the police). 

Yup, so there was a little insight into my heritage. Fun times, fun times.

Bye for now!

Week 2: ALPHABETS (Blog #3)

Hello people!!

I apologize in advance to anyone who has chosen me as their "BBF" this week because I have a pretty boring post. But cool pictures at the end!!!!!! Stay with me.

Alright, like I just said, kind of a boring post this week. Pretty short though! All I did was work on my alphabets. One is the cursive alphabet, upper and lower case. There were a couple of letters I struggled with, but overall I think it went pretty well. I'm excited to start writing some quotes! If you have any quote suggestions pleaaassee comment. I think I will also try to incorporate some designs into the quotes, like extra embellishments. 

In addition to the cursive alphabet, I worked on a block letter alphabet. It's inspired by Seb Lester (shown in last post) but I had to improvise a bit since there was no guide. I think I need to keep working on it but... Anyway, with this alphabet I'll probably write words like copmany names or something rather than a quote because its not elegant like the cursive alphabet.

So, an important part of calligraphy is posture, especially with cursive. When you have good posture, it's easier to write the letters smoothly. I've done some very basic research on the effects of poor posture:

- Poor digestion

- Varicose veins

- Back pain (obviously)

- Bad mood (when you slouch, your mood automatically darkens)

- Decrease in lung function

- Growth issues

- Osteoarthritis (Bad posture disrupts the natural load bearing system of your joints. Joint may calcify and fuse bones in unnatural ways. It always leads to pain)

I think this will be part of my Ted Talk. I think cursive/handwriting should be implemented in elementary schools (implemented as in actually focused on) because it's a cool skill, but also because handwriting things helps with memory and cursive requires good posture.

Ok, so here is some of the stuff I did this week:

Here's the uppercase alphabet. Pretty fun, harder than the lowercase for some reason. Please ignore the awkward and alone 'N' on the first page...

Here's the lowercase alphabet. I think it went pretty well, however on some of the letters I couldn't quite decide on a specific style (typical cursive vs. the model I was looking at).

This is the Seb Lester inspired style. A little rough. And the "VANS' and "NO CHILL" are imitations, I did not randomly decide to write those.

Well, bye for now.

Week 1: There's ink on my fingers

Hello people!!!!!

I tried my hand at calligraphy for the first time this week! There is ink ALL OVER MY FINGERS!! I started with the real calligraphy pen and let me tell you, it is so fun, but pretty difficult.

Alright, so pens. I don't think I'm going to use a brush pen. The actual calligraphy pen is pretty difficult because of the upward/downward strokes and the amount of pressure that needs to be applied, so I think it will be enough without the brush pen. The calligraphy mini set I purchased has 4 ink cartridges and 3 different nibs (tips). The tips are fine, medium, and broad. I did not try the fine tip, but I used both medium and broad. I liked the medium much more than the broad because the broad bled too much. But when I switched the tips, I got a tonnn of ink on my hands #art

So, slight change of plans. I've decided to change the alphabets I want to learn. I will still pursue the lowercase alphabet I posted previously. The calligraphy set that I bought comes with an uppercase alphabet that I will be working on in tandem with the lowercase alphabet I already posted. In addition to that pair, I will be working on a Seb Lester style. Seb Lester has a form of calligraphy using a thick marker and making block-type letters. There is a certain way that the rounded letters have to be made, and everything has to be written with precision.

Seb Lester style

Through this week, I've learned a couple of things. The first, and most blatantly obvious to me, is that my cursive is SERIOUSLY lacking. One alphabet that I'm focusing on is deeply grounded in cursive, obviously, and the way you hold the calligraphy pen is how you are supposed to hold the pen while writing cursive. Because I haven't had "formal training" in cursive, I struggle a little with the calligraphy pen, but whatever. Another thing I've realized is that calligraphy isn't always cursive or elegant handwriting. It can be something like what Seb Lester does or anything that can be categorized as beautiful handwriting. 

Ok, so actually getting to my calligraphy. This was just some of the final products I did. I had 3 pages of my struggles with the pen, but I'm choosing to not post those because... you know... they're terrible. Anyway!! Here's some of my writing: 

Here are a couple of the links that I used while writing: 

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOsGCh1ltFw

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=comgcj90TFs

Bye for now