Hello everyone! My name is Hayley Boigenzahn, and I am a junior Chemical Engineering major with a minor in Computer Science. Since high school, I have always been very involved in band, so mainly my extracurricular hobbies are music related. I have played French Horn for about 8 years, plus I play xylophone in the Pep Band and am working on learning guitar. Since I came to WPI, I have also been involved in tech and acting for Masque, the organization that puts on non-musical plays.
Art was a hobby I picked up during high school, doing elaborate drawings on the back of old homework assignments. Since I’m often busy with other activities, I haven’t always spent as much time on my art as I would have liked. I’m sure that I could learn a lot from other students who have more artistic
background and practice. I took Figure Drawing at WPI to improve my ability to draw people and characters, and still enjoy doing studies and sketches in pencil and occasionally charcoal. I also enjoy painting- I use acrylic or gouache, because that’s what I happen to already own.
I definitely enjoy Photoshop, and have had experience with both digital painting and photo-editing. However, everything I’ve done in Photoshop
recently is more of speed-paint style than a long term project because it runs slowly on my laptop. I have also had some experience with Zbrush, from when I took 3D Modelling during freshman year at WPI. Since I am a CS minor, I have experience programming in a few different languages, but very little of it has been related to art or development – mostly data analysis.
I don’t usually like to create my own characters, so a lot of my artwork would be considered fan art, or at least contains a reference to something. I am a big fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, which are great for imagery. I also like combining characters and settings from separate stories together. In the world of landscapes, my influences are my grandma, who paints crafts and landscapes, and Bob Ross, who hosted a PBS series called The Joy of Painting in which he taught wet-on-wet oil technique for speed painting landscapes.
I will admit that I’m not sure what my artistic goals are right now. The best goal for me to start with is to spend more time doing art. I had very little time for any hobby over the past semester because of IQP, so any goal I make now would have no recent context to it. Once I spend more time getting into my projects, both personal and for this class, I’m sure better artistic goals will become apparent.