I failed at piano, here’s what I’m doing next

 by: Alexis Almada

Being in quarantine has kind of put everyone in a funk. I know for me, I have been feeling really down and it's hard to cheer myself up by being stuck in a house for almost 4 weeks now. 

In order to keep myself busy, I usually find myself doing something creative. Whether it be making art, listening to music, taking photos, or making videos, I often rely on the arts to keep me entertained. So I thought, what better way to cure this quarantine depression than with a little bit of music?

For this 30-day project, I thought I would teach myself how to play the piano, but things didn’t go to plan.

I thought that learning the piano would be fun, a good stress reliever, and something to get me outside of my comfort zone, but I didn’t enjoy it. By the end of the first week, I started lacking motivation and it felt like more of a pain to sit down and play the piano than anything else.

It was at this moment I realized why I stick to the visual arts and not performance.

Recording myself playing the piano was awkward and if I’m being honest, I kind of didn’t want to do it. I started slacking really quickly and I knew I had to change my project.

I started researching online some 30-day photography challenges that I could do and I decided to take my own spin on the challenge. I thought it would be a good idea to push my skills and creative thinking in design. Instead of taking pictures of things, I will be illustrating, collaging, photoshopping, and anything else I can think of along the way. I want to experiment and challenge myself.

This past year, I started to become really passionate about art and graphic design and the more I can develop my skills, the better. I chose this as my new project because I already know it’s something I love to do, I am just pushing my artistic abilities.

Some things that I have found challenging while creating my pieces is coming up with creative interpretations of the prompts I have listed for the 30 days. It has also been a little difficult to create a new piece every day because some of them take a long time to make. However, I am really enjoying this project because I am learning new techniques and styles along the way.

My overall goal is to create an online portfolio with these 30 pieces describing the process, research, inspiration, and brainstorming along the way.