Process: I boiled lavender seed in water for 10 minutes. Then I took 100g solution to mix with different solutes. It forms different colors of natural dye.

These are the collages of my interests.

1. This page is mainly about impressionism work. I like the feeling of vague and free in theses work. I also inserted a little poem called Six-Armed Musician. This poem gives me the same feeling as these work do.

2. This page composes many famous Chinese calligraphy. The grey characters were from a famous calligrapher called MiFu in Chinese ancient times. I especially like his character form because it shows a sense of strength. All of his work are gorgeous and valuable. The four big characters in the middle are from a Chinese idiom, which has a deep meaning: Great virtue can carry all things.

3. I’ve always been interested in human form and the beautiful body curves. I hope to investigate them by making clay sculptures, clay casting or 3D printing.

For this project, we started by brain storming what is visual culture about.From my view, visual culture is what we see and how people perceive what we see. It can also be about the artworks people made to show a specific culture.

For the second step, I did a color walk between the new school building and Loeb Hall. This walk stated by following the color red. I documented the colors I saw in the following words:

Red neon billboard

A woman with red cap

A man with red scarf

Red fire hydrant

Red shop sign

Red “BLICK ART STORE”

Red “PARSONS”

Green construction frame

Green mail box

Green leaves of trees along the road

Green shop sign of SWEET GREEN

Green wheels of bicycle

Road is painted green

A dark blue truck

A man in dark blue coat

Dark blue shop signs

Light yellow newspaper box

Light yellow wall outside Strand book store

Traffic lights are painted light yellow

Light yellow signs painted on the road

Light yellow advertisement of hamburgers

Light yellow taxi

Light yellow sign of Valley National Bank

Light yellow flower pot

Brown door

Brown tree trunk

Brown stick outside a gate

I also painted two different color wheels, one is a circle and the other is a triangle:

Scanned Documents 1-10w6a7d

Scanned Documents 2-1krlzpv

I use combined different color pieces to express mood and feelings:

Serious

Serenity 

Calm

I grouped with other three people and we used our various color pieces to create our special color wheel.

In the next step, each one of us chose a specific color and did some research.

I chose the classic black. I did some research on the connotation of this color:

Black can be linked with power, fear, mystery, strength, authority, elegance, formality, death, evil, aggression and sophistication. Black is the absence of color. It is a mysterious color that is particularly associated with the unknown or the negative.

For my final piece, I carved a dead tree with black plastic foam board. 

My design is a calming pillow. I plan to make this pillow with white fabric outside and fill it with cotton or grains.

I’m going to dye the fabric with the plants which helps people to sleep well.

I did some research about the plants that help people to sleep.

• Jasmine.
• Lavender.
• Snake Plant
• Aloe Vera.
• Gardenia.
• Spider Plant.
• Valerian.
• English Ivy.

The three type of target users would be the elderlies, the stressful workers and the stressful students.

According to the research, the average time for People around 60-80 to stay on bed is 7.5-8 hours. However, they only fall asleep for 6-6.5 hours. People above 60 years old only have 10% of deep sleep time among total sleep time. People above 75 years old almost don’t have deep sleep.  The workers aged from 25-35 are facing huge stress as they just start their career and they have many responsibilities. The students around 16-20 years old are facing the stress from exams and homework.

Different colors and patterns would be designed for different users.