My name is Liam Stearns and I am an electrical and computer engineering student from here in Worcester, MA. Art plays a significant role in my life in various ways. To start off, my father is a self taught graphic artist who now teaches his craft at Worcester Technical High School. Throughout my life at home, I had constantly been exposed to Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Screen printing and more. As I grew older and became more interested in technology, I found myself toying around with some of these artistic mediums whether it was for educational or personal applications. Playing video games has been a hobby of mine since I was very young. Outside of school and the art courses I have taken, I found myself recording hours of gameplay and editing videos in Adobe Premiere and Aftereffects in an attempt to replicate the many professional videos I would see on YouTube when growing up.
Since I was very young I always knew that I wanted to be an engineer. The sound of digging through a bucket of Lego bricks would disturb the entire household from the time I woke up until I went to bed. I had a history of developing my own mechanisms for creations such as Lego blasters which fired bricks, and working pinball machines. My love for the toy bricks sparked my great interest in electrical components and microcontrollers, which I began exploring in high school. While I attended Worcester Technical High School myself, I had been a part of the Robotics and Automation trade, where every other week was spent working exclusively on wiring circuits, programming microcontrollers, 3d modeling, 3d printing and more. One of the projects I am most proud of during that time is a fully automated skittles sorter which had been developed entirely from the ground up.
Outside of my education I have worked on a significant amount of tech projects. To name just a couple, I have built multiple mechanical keyboards, a raspberry pi arcade machine, a few computers, and some small scale Arduino projects. Other than working on projects related to these, I spend the majority of my time still building Lego, both preconstructed sets and free form creation. As I’ve grown older, Lego has become more than just a fun hobby, but also my form of meditation and stress relief.
Impressive – your breath in medium is very impressive. You have made a lot of cool stuff using very different tools.
Inventive – I thought your Skittles sorter and arcade machine were pretty creative. I liked how you were able to implement what you learned into various things.
Dark- I like that a lot of your pieces utilize shadows quite a bit. I really like your skull drawing especially! It is very well done and kind of creepy.
Quirky – I love the styles of your Lego Mosaic and Arcade Machine! They’re very cool to look at and must have taken a lot of effort to complete!
Inventive – You have an innate curiosity and use it to create diverse projects. Very cool!
Clever – I like that there is a common color scheme within your artwork (the ones posted at least). It is also impressive that you combine your art with what you are passionate about (combining legos and ECE).
Familiar – Your love of Legos is something I find quite familiar. While I can’t say I ever created things to the same functionality as some of your achievements, I too also spend quite a lot of time building various things with Legos, brings back many memories. Outside of that, the rest of your creations sound quite cool! A fully automatic Skittles sorter sounds like an insane achievement.