Hi!
Welcome to the blog of the SOOOO MUCH/MANY series. Well I don’t actually have too much time, I mean I did do some work for my theme project as well as the weekly classes. This is just in contrast to a regular school term in SUTD. So I picked up a few projects that I really wanted to complete on my own and here are some of them.
Learning Illustrator
Well this has been at the top of my todo list for the longest time possible and never really had the time to work on that so finally could really sit down to understand how to use illustrator in detail.
I even wanted to purchase an online course to learn from or sign up for monthly membership on skillshare to learn it properly, but decided to start with youtube videos first then move on.
In my time outside of school, I do some graphic design here and there, doing graphics design for some school clubs, my district when they have events and even taking up various paid assignments like designing small company logos. But I have only been using Photoshop which honestly is not great for graphic design.
So I figured if I was gonna up continue keeping this up, I will need to learn Illustrator. Literally, I set it my goal to learn it such that I will not take u anymore assignments until I got Illustrator down.
So yeah, finally got to it starting with the basics by watching Youtube videos involving making flat design, literally the easiest things to draw haha. Here is one of the videos if you all are interested.
And here are the final pieces that I made by following the tutorials 🙂
Dancing better
Dance has been a big part of my life since JC times but I honestly only got more serious last year when I joined SUTD. I have had many hobbies before dance, many serious hobbies actually like Golfing and Waterpolo which I both represented my school for and have spent countless hours on. But I never really lasted with any of these hobbies. Reasons include being lazy, feeling defeated by failure and losing interest.
These are honestly very horrible reasons/excuses of not continuing with these because I am sure everyone who does something well have felt these before but still pushed through because they really want it and know that it is all worth it in the end.
Throughout my dance journey, there are many times that I felt like quiting. Starting off being a guy with two left feet, I certainly did not have the talent to do well in dance. There are many instances when I was learning at the start that I really could not tell apart my left and right limbs and would always go the wrong way when learning choreographies.
I have been singled out so many times by my instructor to do the moves correctly, and sometimes I would even be forced to do it while everyone else just watches me.
Well, I did leave a few times then and stopped dancing for a while because I was really too frustrated with myself to continue but it was always my friends and the sheer enjoyment of moving your body to music that brought me back. The dance community is honestly one of the best around.
I feel like there is a reason why dance clubs in schools are always one of the biggest clubs. Well some might attribute it to us being cool and all but honestly I feel it is because of our endless explosive energy and the close bonds that are very obvious to even others not in the community. This energy really draws me in and I feel like it is something very different and difficult to find when u take up other hobbies.
So I decided that hey this is IT for me. Like this is the one hobby that I must continue to pursue, something that even if I do not get great achievements with, I would still be able to tell myself that I have no regrets when I move on one day.
In SUTD, my dance journey has been jam packed which I am extremely grateful for. Dance DerivativeZ has definitely provided me the best avenue for me to develop my skills. However, I did not really have time for myself to explore for myself and to really drill on my own since it was packed with events. So with this trip away from Singapore and away from DDZ (I really miss them though) , I was definitely to explore more by myself and work on my techniques.
I also found a really good twice weekly dance class here that focuses on foundation drilling and has a very young engaging instructor that helps us with our technique and execution.
This is a video I edited here but choreographed and filmed while I was still in Singapore for Dance DerivativeZ:
Here are some videos of my self training and class videos:
Overall, I hope to continue training hard and improving. THE ONLY WAY IS UP!!
Rest and Relax
This was actually my main side quest on this ALP trip, it is probably the last ever time in my early life that I would be able to spend a term away in a foreign land having very much lesser things to do. I think in this few weeks here, I probably already slept more than I did in the whole of term 3 in terms of hours and I am really really glad for that.
But then again, I do not want to waste all my time here away just sleeping and lazing around, so I definitely will keep myself as occupied as possible because the time I have here is certainly plenty and would be a waste if I do not spend it well.
If you got to here, thank you for spending time to read bout how I spend my time here so far and I hope your time be it in ALP or at your internship or whatever endeavors you are pursuing is well spent too.
Thanks :)))
