Art Event #2

Today I went to Leah Moreno's SMP (St. Mary's Project) Presentation, entitled "The Magic Flute Project". Leah Moreno did her SMP on Mozart's The Magic Flute and added various illustrations to the story. She also changed Mozart's version in several ways. She also created a website so "fans" can track her progress and see how the story is coming along. Overall, I was really interested in Leah Moreno's presentation and she did a great job of showing her work to the audience.

One specific change that Moreno made to the story is that she made the original main character, named Tamino, into a girl named Tamina. She explained her decision in that she did not like that in the original story Prince Tamino seemed above everyone else just because he was a man. It was really cool to see the changes in the story and understand why she made them. I believe that taking a very old story and changing it is really an interesting idea. I have learned that this process is how stories were told before we wrote them down, people would change and there would be many different versions of the same story.

Leah Moreno also explained her process of creating the illustrations. She explained how she would start out with rough sketches, just to show the lights and darks of the scene. Then she would move on to creating a sketch on the computer and finally she would use this digitalized image to paint with watercolors. I found it really interesting how she used a computer when her final product used watercolors. Also, after this past unit in digital art (Web Design) I couldn't help but to judge her webpage at least a little. I can tell that there is not much work up yet (just "The Beginning") but I like how there are tabs to show "The Project" and "The Process". Overall, the website design is really cool, but more information should be added (which is shown by the "under construction" notes on the pages). I really like Leah Moreno's SMP presentation!