the alphabet, food, and keyboards. what more does a college student need?

*I did not have an invitation to the blog until today! This is assignment #1*
Like my peers, I was completely overwhelmed by this assignment because there was so many possibilities. Following the advice of the TED talk we watched in class, I decided to give myself some restrictions to 'boost' my creativity. I decided to do something on paper, probably because when I think of creativity I think of art, which in my mind is something on a wall in a gallery. Obviously doing something on a piece of paper doesn't narrow it down too much, so I decided that I wouldn't use any typical writing/painting utensil. I also limited myself to things I had available in my apartment, which was cleaning products and food. Next I had to decide what I wanted to put on the paper. I'm a terrible artist but I really like typography, so I stuck with that. I decided to write out the alphabet. I felt like I was really on a roll with the 'college student' theme; things you could find in an apartment, the alphabet (something we use everyday), but I wanted it to be a little more 'creative', so I decided I couldn't just spew out the alphabet from a-z. I ended up following a qwerty keyboard, which is the order the letters follow on a typical american laptop or desktop, starting with q and ending with m. This is what I ended up with:

It's not very pretty, and to be honest by the end I didn't feel very creative, but it did draw some interesting parallels for me. For instance, some of the sweet and colorful food I thought would show up more on the paper hardly came through at all. Some of the more bitter or gross foods, on the other hand, showed up really well. It sounds cliche, but it was kind of like life. Sometimes we do these really easy 'sweet' things with great expectations, but after the big picture is completed we can hardly see them. When we do 'bitter' things, however, they are like big bright yellow spots, even though they are kind of smelly, and we weren't really sure what we were getting ourselves into when first started putting it on our 'canvas.'